Early members included W.E.B.

Du Bois, Ida B.

Wells and Jane Addams.

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Among its signature programs today: Project Ready, preparing urban youth for college, work and life.

The group led the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Campaign and March to Montgomery.

Its purpose: to reconnect African Americans with their African heritage, establish economic independence and promote self-determination.

Newspaper editor and former slave T. Thomas Fortune formed the National Afro-American League, heralded as the first major all-black civil rights organization.

The OAAU disbanded in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965.

A group of student activists working on a campaign for the equal treatment of African American teachers in Norfolk, Virginia, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

The largest Negro city in the world is located in what formerly was a fashionable residential section of New York City, Harlem, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

Uniformed African-American railroad porters playing pool & cards while relaxing at Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters HQ in Harlem, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

Educator Mary McLeod Bethune sits at a desk, possibly in the Chicago Defender offices in 1942, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

Freedom Riders on a Greyhound bus sponsored by the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE), sit on the ground outside the bus after it was set afire by a group of whites in Anniston, Alabama, May 14, 1961, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

A civil rights rights march to Montgomery walks past Brown Chapel in Selma in 1965, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

Stokely Carmichael, national head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee speaks from the hood of an automobile on the campus of Florida A&M University, April 16, 1967, in Tallahassee, Florida, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

African-American Muslim minister and civil rights activist Malcolm X holding a movie camera, Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations

Activist Rev. Al Sharpton speaks outside the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1992., Historical Review of Leading Black Civil Rights Organizations