The NAACP: The First Fifty Years

Patricia Sullivan is a Research Associate at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and a former Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

The NAACP achieved its greatest notoriety in 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The organization had, by that time, compiled a fifty-year history that emphasized legal challenge to segregation and the importance of a regional presence. Patricia Sullivan explains the birth and historical development of the nation's largest civil rights organization.