The Call That Founded the NAACP

On February 12, 1909, a group centered in New York issued a public appeal for a national conference on the treatment of Black Americans, timed to Abraham Lincoln's hundredth birthday. The push came out of outrage over a race riot the previous August in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's own adopted hometown, where mobs lynched two Black men and burned Black-owned homes and businesses. Socialist journalist William English Walling, settlement worker Mary White Ovington, and social worker Henry Moskowitz met in New York that January to organize a response, and writer Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, drafted the document known as the Call. About sixty people signed it, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the few Black signers. Three months later the Call brought more than forty people together at Manhattan's Henry Street Settlement, where they formed the National Negro Committee, the body that within two years took the name it still carries: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.