Powell v. Alabama

Founded in 1909 by both black and white civil rights activists, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has fought to curtail and eliminate discrimination through legal action. Since its inception, the NAACP used the court system to quash discriminatory codes and statutes so that African Americans could exercise their constitutional rights. The organization's key early court victories include: Guinn v. United States in 1915, which removed grandfather clauses that restricted voting rights; Moore v. Dempsey in 1923, which held that excluding African Americans from juries was unconstitutional; and Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, which barred racially restrictive land agreements.

Thurgood Marshall become the special counsel for the NAACP in 1936 and later became the U.S. Supreme Court's first African American justice in 1967. In 1940, the organization established a separate legal branch, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which Marshall headed. The NAACP won one of its greatest Supreme Court victories in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. In this case, the Court held that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.