Moorfield Storey (March 19, 1845 – October 24, 1929) was an American lawyer, anti-imperial activist, and civil rights leader based in Boston, Massachusetts. According to Storey's biographer, William B. Hixson, Jr., he had a worldview that embodied "pacifism, anti-imperialism, and racial egalitarianism fully as much as it did laissez-faire and moral tone in government." Storey served as the founding president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving from 1909 to his death in 1929. He opposed United States expansionism beginning with the Spanish–American War. Early life Moorfield Storey was born in 1845 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, then a suburb of Boston. His family was descended from the earliest Puritan settlers in New England and had close connections with the abolitionist movement. Storey's father was a Boston lawyer. The young Storey went to the Boston Latin School and graduated in 1862, during the beginning of the Civil War. He then continued onto Harvard, where he was a member of the Glee Club, graduating in 1866, and then studied at Harvard Law School. In a speech almost thirty years later at Cambridge University, Storey discussed the mindset of the young men of his generation, stating that "a great movement for intellectual, religious, and political freedom was just culminating..." Friendship with Edward Waldo Emerson and the Emerson family Storey was longtime friends with Edward Waldo Emerson, son of famous American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. The two were in the same graduating class at Harvard. Just after their graduation, Storey was one of two friends that accompanied Emerson on a camping trip. Also among the party was the elder Emerson, as well as Transcendentalist poet William Ellery Channing. The camping party encountered a fierce storm on their second night out, and Storey worked to lighten the mood by singing through storm, with the younger Emerson joining in to sing the chorus. The event is recorded in Ralph Waldo Emerson's journals of the time. The two men's friendship continued for the next several decades, and they wrote a biography of former United States Attorney General Ebenezer R. Hoar together in 1911. Time with Charles Sumner From 1867 to 1869, Storey was a clerk for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and served as a private secretary to its chairman, Senator Charles Sumner. Storey was introduced to Sumner through his father, and moved to the Senator's house after his graduation