The first legal challenges to have any significant effect on segregation were those made by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)- the oldest civil rights organization in the country. The NAACP was formed after a 1908 lynching of two blacks in Springfield, Illinois which then led to a call by Mary Ovington, a white woman, for a conference to discuss ways to achieve political and social equality for blacks. The conference led to the founding of the NAACP the following year with one of the organization's founders being W.E.B. Du Bois. The new biracial organization committed itself to eliminating racial discrimination and segregation in all areas of American life by peaceful and lawful means. Eight prominent Americans-seven whites and a black-served on the original board of the NAACP. The single black board member was Du Bois, who rejected the gradualism of Booker T. Washington and demanded immediate equality for blacks. He edited the NAACP magazine "The Crisis," which reported on race relations around the world. The NAACP grew so rapidly that in 1915 it was able to organize a partial boycott of the film "The Birth of a Nation," which portrayed blacks of the Reconstruction era in an insulting way. Most of the NAACP's early efforts were directed against lynchings. Partially as a result of the organization's efforts, the number of lynchings decreased and the practice virtually diasppeared by the 1950s. In the 1930's the NAACP embarked on a campaign to contest segregation in American education through legal challenges in the courts. The straegy was based on a report by Nathan Margold, a white lawyer for the NAACP who advocated challenging the constitutionality of the separate but equal doctrine enshrined in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of the Supreme Court. The NAACP won it's first case on segregation when a young black man Donald Murry wanted to attend a previously all white law school at the University of Maryland. Following this, the NAACP had many other various favorable court decisions in their favor. One famous name to come out of the NAACP's court rooms was Thurgood Marshall, who joined the legal staff of the NAACP in 1963. He represented a client in the 1954 desegregation in education landmark case, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, before the Supreme Court, being one of the most famous civil rights cases in history. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed him the first black justice on the nations highest court. The distinctive strategic emphasis of the NAACP - ending discrimination through legal action - evolved during it's first twenty years.
