Established in 1911 by white and African American civil-rights activists, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People led the assault on segregation in the South. The Crisis (founded 1911), edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, was for many years the most widely read journal among African Americans. The legal defense fund, led by Charles Hamilton Houston, a Howard University Law School professor, began the effort to overturn the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established the practice of “separate but equal.” Houston’s protégé, Thurgood Marshall, won the landmark victory against segregation, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which asserted that separate is “inherently unequal.” Often viewed as biased towards elite and northern blacks, the work of E.D. Nixon, a union organizer and local leader in the NAACP, and Rosa Parks, secretary of an NAACP chapter, in bringing about the Montgomery bus boycott highlights the strong grassroots element of the organization.