 From November 1963 through April 1964, the Chester School Protests were a series of civil rights protests led by George Raymond of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP) and Stanley Branche of the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) that made Chester, Pennsylvania one of the key battlegrounds of the civil rights movement.James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality called Chester ""the Birmingham of the North"".In 1962, Branche and the CFFN focused on improving conditions at the predominantly black Franklin Elementary school in Chester.