Every February during Black History Month, the nation celebrates the milestones and achievements of African Americans.

This year, of course, the celebration has special ignificance because it starts less than two weeks after Barack Obama took the oath of office as the country’s first African American president.

It also has special significance because it marks the 100th anniversary of America’s oldest and most important civil rights group.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP for short — was founded a century ago on February 12, 1909.

The date was chosen to coincide with the 100th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the president who signed the famous Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in America’s southern states during the nation’s Civil War.

Yet its founding was a reaction to new and violent setbacks experienced by African Americans, including 1908 race riots in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois in which a mob in the city of Springfield “raged for two days, killed and wounded scores of Negroes and drove thousands from the city.”

The NAACP founders declared that “If Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country in the flesh, he would be disheartened and discouraged,” as the group put it in a call to action issued to the nation.

The NAACP founders included black Americans and white Americans and the civil rights pioneers W.E.B. DuBois, Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, who wrote the call to action.

One hundred years later, the NAACP’S mission remains to “ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”

In its history, the NAACP has been at the center of key civil rights struggles time and time again.

Early on it successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson to take a stand against the lynchings of African Americans. Later it succeeded in getting President Harry Truman to ban racial discrimination in the federal government.

It fought and won the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that made it illegal to offer separate and segregated schools for black and white children.

It led civil rights marches and boycotts against unfair treatment of blacks like that experienced by Rosa Parks on an Alabama bus.

Today, the NAACP has a new president and is facing new challenges.

In May 2008, the group chose its youngest president ever to lead it forward in the 21st century.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, 35 when selected, inherited an organization that has suffered financial problems in recent years. He has vowed to use technology and the Internet to raise money, attract new members and give the group new influence.

“Across the country there are people in my generation who have checked out of this organization,” Jealous told the Associated Press news service. “Now is the time to check back in.”