The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 as a civil rights organization for African-Americans during some of the most violent times of segregation in the United States.
With locations across the United States, it grew to ensure the rights for all people within the country no matter race or ethnicity: "to fight for social justice for all Americans.".
William English Walling from Louisville, Kentucky (1877–1936), an American labor reformer and socialist educated at the University of Chicago, the Hull House and Harvard Law School, brought his interest in women's rights to his work with the American Federation of Labor and founded the National Women's Trade Union League.
A few years later, the Springfield Race Riot of 1908 in Illinois informed his work with Mary White Ovington and Henry Moskowitz to form the NAACP.
Vallateen Virginia Dudley Abbington (1907–2003), one of several school teachers in Louisville who petitioned against the differential in pay, became a plaintiff in an NAACP suit argued by Thurgood Marshall that led to the removal of a 15 percent salary discrepancy between black and white teachers in the Louisville public schools.