OVINGTON, MARY WHITE
(April 11, 1865–July 15, 1951) Harlem Renaissance supporter, suffragist, journalist, organization cofounder
During the Jim Crow era, Mary White Ovington became active in the crusade for Southerners’ civil rights after hearing Frederick Douglass speak in 1890. She extended her reform crusade to the North after hearing an address by Booker T. Washington in 1903. After two years at Radcliffe College, in 1895, Ovington helped found the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn, where she remained until 1904, when she was appointed fellow of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations. In subsequent years, she studied employment and housing problems in black Manhattan, resulting in her book Half a Man (1911). It was during her studies that she met sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who introduced her to the founding members of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Ovington, influenced by the ideas of William Morris, joined the Socialist Party in 1905, where she met other activists who argued that racial problems were as much a matter of class as race. She wrote for several radical journals and newspapers, including the Masses, the New York Evening Post, and the Call. Ever the influenced and influential individual, after reading an article by socialist William English Walling entitled “Race War in the North,” which calls for an influential body of citizens to rescue blacks, Ovington responded and met with Walling, among others.
The group launched a campaign that issued a plea for a national conference on the civil and political rights of black Americans on February 12, 1909. Many activists responded to the plea, leading to the establishment of the National Negro Committee, which held its first meeting from May 31, 1909 to June 1, 1909. It was during the second meeting of the National Negro Committee, in 1910, that an organizational structure and new name were adopted, the NAACP. Its initial purposes were to improve the economic and social conditions of black people in cities throughout the United States and promote blacks’ rights as citizens. Ovington was appointed the NAACP’s executive secretary, while remaining active in the struggle for women’s suffrage and opposed to U.S. involvement in World War I. Ovington served the NAACP as board member, executive secretary, chairman, and treasurer.
Ovington, a journalist, made major contributions to the literature about blacks and other popular subjects with her scholarly research. Her publications include the book The Status of the Negro in the United States (1913); the book Socialism and the Feminist Movement (1914); an anthology for black children, The Upward Path (1919); biographical sketches of prominent African Americans in Portraits in Color (1927); the autobiography Reminiscences (1932); and a history of the NAACP, The Walls Come Tumbling Down (1947).
Ovington retired as a board member of the NAACP in 1947. The association declared her the “mother of the new emancipation.” She spent decades of her life fighting for the equal rights of black Americans.—Aisha M. Johnson