NAACP leaders are holding a poster against racial bias in Mississippi in 1956.

In 1954, after the Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision (in Brown v. Board of Education) to ban school segregation, the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) got to work looking for towns and cities in the American South where legal action might force local leaders to accept the decision and desegregate. But the NAACP had been active for a long time before then.

It was the Topeka chapter of the NAACP that assembled the plaintiffs for the Brown v. Board of Education case, and for decades before that groundbreaking 1954 decision, NAACP activists had been challenging segregation in court.

After their first major victory, individual chapters followed their own paths. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the NAACP was led by Daisy Bates and her husband Lucius, and they published their own newspaper dedicated to race-related issues. Part of the newspaper brought violations of the Brown v. Board of Education decision to the public's attention.

Each chapter of the NAACP had its own leaders and its own identity. Thanks to Daisy Bates and her husband, the Little Rock chapter was aggressive and ready for the challenges of desegregation in the near future.

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