Whereas the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), originally known as the National Negro Committee, was founded in New York City on February 12, 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, by a multiracial group of activists who met in a national conference to discuss the civil and political rights of African Americans; Whereas the multiracial founders of the NAACP were a distinguished group of leaders in the struggle for human rights, including Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, and William English Walling; Whereas the NAACP is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States; Whereas the NAACP has branches in all 50 States and approximately a dozen prison chapters; Whereas the NAACP National Headquarters is located in Baltimore, Maryland; Whereas the mission of the NAACP is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination; Whereas the NAACP is committed to achieving its goals through nonviolence including negotiation, litigation, and protestation; Whereas the NAACP advances its mission through reliance upon peaceful protest, the petition, the ballot, and the courts, and has been persistent in the use of legal and moral persuasion, even in the face of overt and violent racial hostility; Whereas the NAACP has used political pressure, marches, demonstrations, and effective lobbying to serve as the voice, as well as the shield, for minorities in the United States; Whereas after years of fighting segregation in public schools, the NAACP, under the leadership of Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall, won one of its greatest legal victories in the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)