Sometimes referred to as General Office Files, the Administrative Files hold the core records of the collection.

Board of Directors files include correspondence, memoranda, minutes, reports, and committee records documenting the board's role in setting policy, amending the association's constitution, appointing national officers, authorizing large allocations of funds, approving the formation of branches, adjudicating branch disputes, and setting litigation and lobbying goals. The board's debates and decisions are recorded in minutes of its monthly meetings, supplemented by reports submitted by the association's executive secretary or director, general counsel, treasurer, branch directors, and department heads.

Committee files reflect the board's work regarding awards and scholarships, branches, budgets, conventions, departmental programs, elections, litigation, membership, personnel, policies, resolutions, public relations, youth work, and other topics of concern to the association.

Annual convention files contain speeches, session minutes, programs, delegate lists, press releases and other publicity material, and material related to award ceremonies, memorial services, staff assignments, security arrangements, and workshops. The files highlight the annual convention's role as a forum for passing resolutions that guided NAACP policy, an opportunity for local and national NAACP leaders to interact, and a public relations event.

The Board of Directors and annual convention files are organized as separate series in Part I. In Part II, they are included in the General Office File series. Parts III, IV, VI, and VIII form part of the Administrative File series.

Most parts include a general office file that documents the work of the NAACP's national staff, especially the executive secretary or director who oversaw the day-to-day operation of the national office and served as the principal spokesperson for the organization. Featured are correspondence, memoranda, reports, travel files, speeches, and writings of James Weldon Johnson from 1920 to 1931, Walter Francis White from 1931 to 1955, Roy Wilkins from 1955 to 1977, and Benjamin L. Hooks from 1977 to 1993. Similar types of material are also included for other national officers and key staff members, including deputy executive secretaries or directors, Crisis magazine editors, and department heads. The general office file documents the broad range of civil rights activities administered by the national staff concerning economic development and opportunity, education, health, housing, labor, and military and veterans affairs. Material related to this work and the NAACP's collaboration with other organizations is filed by topic, name of organization, or the name of the relevant NAACP department. Departmental records that are particularly voluminous have been organized as separate series.

Also located in the general office file is material relating to administrative matters, including the association's constitution and bylaws, annual reports, organizational histories, and files from departments handling finances, fund-raising, personnel, public relations, and training.

In lieu of a general office file, Part I includes a subject file within the Administrative File series. Part II contains a general office file organized as a separate series. In Parts III, IV, VI, and VIII, the file is a subseries in the Administrative File series.

The collection's extensive legal files document the NAACP's efforts to end racial discrimination and segregation through federal and state courts. Included are affidavits, briefs, correspondence, depositions, exhibits, interrogatories, lawyer's notes, petitions, summaries, and trial transcripts representing the NAACP's litigation efforts from its first case defending Pink Franklin in 1910 to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978. Until 1956, the NAACP's legal activities were carried out by its Legal Defense Fund. The fund's files are organized as Legal File series in Parts I and II. In 1956 the Legal Defense Fund separated from the association to preserve the NAACP's tax-exempt status and was recreated as an independent entity called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Part III contains its records as a separate series. However, the NAACP continued to pursue litigation through its own Legal Department, and its records from the 1960s through 1995 constitute Part V of the collection. Additional case files from this period can be found in Part VIII.

The Manuscript Division holds a separate collection of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund records, which documents the organization's legal program through the mid-1960s and its coordinated attack on legal segregation and racial discrimination waged in state, federal, and supreme courts. The collection includes administrative records, conference agenda, reports, committee files, correspondence and memoranda, notes, printed material, and legal case files. The catalog record and finding aid to the collection are linked below.

Branch files documenting activities of local NAACP branches, state conferences, and regional offices consist largely of communications between the national office and local, state, and regional offices retained by the national office. They do not include records retained in the local offices. Correspondence, memoranda, reports, programs, and newsletters sent to the national office provide information about branch formation and reorganization, elections, internal disputes, membership drives, fund-raising campaigns, meetings, conferences, training, and local civil rights activities and programs. Reports and memoranda of field secretaries, field directors, and regional directors are particularly useful in tracing the progress of civil rights on the local level.

In addition to the materials found in the Manuscript Division, researchers can find items transferred from the NAACP records to other divisions in the Library of Congress because of their special format. Links to catalog records for other types of materials can be found below.