As Reconstruction came to a close, many Southern and some Northern whites condoned, sanctioned or participated in mob violence–including murderous lynching–as a tool of intimidation, humiliation, and social control over the lives of black Americans. By the beginning of the twentieth century, mob violence was rampant in cities like Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, and as far north as New York City.

But a riot in Springfield, Illinois–the adopted hometown of Abraham Lincoln–would attract national attention. A white mob surged through the streets of Springfield for three days during August 1908, looting and setting fires to homes in the black community. An 84-year-old black man and a black barber were snatched from their homes and lynched without cause. Hundreds were maimed and more than two thousand were forced to flee the city. This environment of inter-racial subjugation was the established landscape that sparked the founding of the NAACP.

William English Walling, a white Southern journalist with liberal views on race, spoke out against the lawlessness in an essay entitled Race War in the North, published in the Independent. Walling’s article was read by Mary White Ovington, a New York activist and a descendant of abolitionists, who wrote Walling to share her desire to establish a national bi-racial organization to help right the wrongs perpetrated against African Americans. During the first week of January 1909, Ovington and New York social worker Henry Moskowitz joined Walling in his New York apartment. They soon enlisted Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, to draft a mission statement.

The declaration would be signed by sixty prominent people of both races (including W. E. B.
Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Moorfield Storey, and Mary Church Terrell) and released on February 12, 1909, the one-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. During the second annual meeting in May 1910, the name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was chosen and was incorporated in New York State.