NAACP co-founder Mary White Ovington was motivated by the violence African Americans faced on a regular basis. She noted the lack of organizations addressing the systemic racial violence occurring nationwide, and she suggested to Oswald Garrison Villard that they form an organization to address the issue. Villard agreed, enlisting the help of Moorfield Storey, a wealthy Boston lawyer.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was co-founded on February 12, 1909, by a multi-racial group of intellectuals, activists, and philanthropists, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Moskowitz, Mary White Ovington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and William English Walling. The organization was formed in part as a response to the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South and to the ongoing racial discrimination and violence prevalent across the United States at the time. The NAACP's founders believed that the U.S. government had failed to protect the civil rights of African Americans, and they established the organization with the mission of "securing the full political, civil, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial prejudice among the citizens of the United States".
The association was founded shortly after the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, one of the numerous and violent instances of unrest around the beginning of the 20th century which drew extensive press coverage. The NAACP's first public meeting, a Conference on the Niagara Movement, was held in New York City in May 1909 and attended by around 60 people, including a number of prominent African-Americans. The meeting focused on the challenges facing African-Americans and outlined the NAACP's goals.
In 1910, the NAACP established a legal department, which would go on to play a major role in challenging discriminatory laws and practices. The department's first major case was Guinn v. United States (1915), in which the Supreme Court ruled that grandfather clauses used by Southern states to disenfranchise African-Americans were unconstitutional. The NAACP also played a key role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.