The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 by a group of black and white reformers. Its roots were in the Niagara Movement, founded in July 1905 by W. E. B. Du Bois and twenty-nine other educated professional black men. They held annual meetings for five years, and their purpose was to protest white America's treatment of black people. Unlike Booker T. Washington, who acquiesced in the separate-but-equal doctrine the Supreme Court had handed down in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Niagara men wanted an integrated society achieved by agitation and legislation. They became convinced that protest would be effective only if it were interracial. After the Springfield, Illinois, riots in 1908, a small group of white reformers — Oswald Garrison Villard, Joel Spingarn, and Mary White Ovington among them — decided that the gradualism advocated by Washington would not work, and...