Saaret Yoseph is a writer and Assistant Editor at TheRoot.com. She manages and blogs for \"Their Eyes Were Watching …\"
Suggested Reading
Joel Elias Spingarn, one of the NAACP's founders and second president. Spingarn was also one of the organization's first Jewish members.
Lawyer, NAACP litigation director and former Dean of Howard University Law School Charles Hamilton Houston. He was involved in nearly every civil rights case brought to the Supreme Court between 1930-1954. Houston also trained Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
A flag, frequently hung from the NAACP headquarters in New York, announces the death of a lynching victim.
Former NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins and former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall at work in the NAACP office.
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt attends an NAACP event in the 1950s.
The 1964 conference on civil rights: From left: Bayard Rustin, Jack Greenberg, Whitney Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph.
Slain civil rights activist and former NAACP state field representative Medgar Evers. Evers, who worked hard to desegregate the University of Mississippi, was shot in his driveway in 1963. His killing shocked the nation and further energized the campaign to desegregate American life.
The controversial 1915 silent film by D.W. Griffith was met with protest and demands of censorship by the NAACP. Despite the organization's national campaign against Birth of a Nation, it went on to become one of the highest selling Hollywood films, eventually beat out by "Gone with the Wind" in 1940.
A student of an integrated school in Sturgis, Ky. is escorted by the National Guard at the end of class.
NAACP and The Crisis magazine office at 69 Fifth Avenue in New York City, N.Y.
A school bus sign advertising one of the NAACP voter registration drives.
NAACP members at the 1934 Crime Conference in Washington, D.C.
A young black man drinks from a segregated water cooler in 1939.
In 1941, an NAACP membership poster targets new recruits and encourages readership of the magazine.
Former NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins holds up a hangman's noose from Florida that was sent to the NAACP national headquarters.
Medgar Evers escorts singer Lena Horne into a Jackson, Miss. meeting hall for a civil rights rally in 1963.
British NAACP picketers brandish anti-lynching posters.
Sept. 5, 1963: Pedestrians stop to look at the damaged home of NAACP attorney Arthur Shores. Assailants had bombed Shores' Birmingham, Ala. home the night before, injuring his wife.
March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.