The First Rural NAACP

Tinner family at their home in the late 1800s. Joseph and Mary Tinner bought land in Falls Church. The construction of Lee Highway was routed through this enclave in the 1920’s.

In the 1900s, Charles' son Joseph Tinner, by then a highly respected and sought-after stonemason with a strong conviction for equality and civil rights, met Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson, a civil rights activist and educator.

Together, Tinner and Henderson advanced the cause of civil rights and in 1918 helped found the first rural branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), paving the way for NAACP rural branches across the South.

The branch was created in response to the threat of residential segregation in Falls Church. In 1912, Virginia authorized towns to establish “segregation districts,” making it legal for local governments to segregate neighborhoods. The U.S. Supreme Court had already cleared the way for local governments to do this. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Court ruled that segregation of public facilities was lawful as long as they were “separate but equal.”

In 1915, elected officials in Falls Church passed an ordinance that relocated Black residents to a small section of the town. Tinner and Henderson called a meeting of the Falls Church Colored Citizens Protective League (CCPL) and went on to file a lawsuit against the ordinance. With pressure, the ordinance was never enforced and was repealed in 1917. Soon after, Tinner was elected the first president of the local NAACP branch.

The group fought the Virginia segregation law in court, ultimately seeing such forced housing segregation outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1917 decision in Buchanan v. Warley.