While many consider the birth of the civil rights movement to be1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, the stage had been set decades before, by activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the NAACP leaders are familiar, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, has been all but forgotten.