Du Bois championed equal rights for all and co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with Moorfield Storey and Mary White Ovington on Feb. 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth. The organization’s mission is “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”
In 1885, when Du Bois attended college at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, he encountered discriminatory Jim Crow laws that were created after the Civil War and segregation. Du Bois worked to advance rights for minorities and women.