Early Challenges: Ida B. Wells, the NAACP and the Great Migration

Resistance to Jim Crow began long before the 1950s. Journalist Ida B. Wells investigated lynchings in the 1890s and showed, through careful evidence, that they were usually acts of racial terror rather than responses to crimes, publishing her findings in Southern Horrors (1892). In 1905 W. E. B. Du Bois and others formed the Niagara Movement, demanding full civil and political rights, and in 1909 a multiracial group founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The NAACP campaigned against lynching, publicized injustice in its magazine The Crisis, and began a long legal strategy, winning early victories such as Guinn v. United States (1915), which struck down a grandfather clause. Meanwhile millions of Black Southerners moved north and west in the Great Migration, seeking work and escaping segregation; their votes in Northern cities gave civil rights new political weight. These foundations made the later mass movement possible.