This article traces the development of the "Deaf President Now" (DPN) movement and its similarities to the black civil rights movement. Movements typically begin with a concrete, precipitating event but are usually the result of known or shared incidents on the part of the participants, and the "Deaf President Now" movement that arose on Gallaudet's campus was like that. For more than a century deaf people had been engaged in improving their status in America. Fights over preserving American Sign Language, building schools, and creating organizations occurred in a world most hearing Americans did not even know existed. The various elements of DPN--students, faculty, staff, alumni--did everything a successful movement must do: they sought support within and outside their own community, they had a strategy. Protests spread to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), demanding better sign language skills for the faculty. In 1996, Dr. Robert Davila was installed as NTID's first deaf vice president. There were protests over threats to close residential schools in Maryland, Washington State, Oregon, Michigan, and New Jersey and over curriculum in South Carolina, about administrations, faculty and board composition in Maryland and Iowa, and about the signing ability of chief executives in Mississippi and New York City. Gallaudet University, chartered in 1864 to serve deaf people, finally, after 124 years, installed its first deaf president in 1988.