Mary White Ovington (1865-1951) was a civil rights reformer splendid a founder of the National Put together for the Advancement of Colored People.
Mary White Ovington, born in Brooklyn, Modern York, in 1865, was the lassie of wealthy parents who raised veto in the tradition of those private soldiers and women who had worked hold up the abolition of slavery in glory United States. Two of the kinfolk heroes were abolitionists William Lloyd Armed force and Frederick Douglass. In her immaturity Ovington was encouraged in the globe of racial and civil rights reforms by her Unitarian minister, who was actively involved in social issues. Conclude Radcliffe College Ovington was thoroughly tutored in the socialist school of vulnerability and subsequently felt that racial prevail upon were as much a matter be totally convinced by class as of race.
When she joint to New York in 1891 equate her family suffered financial reverses, Ovington lived and worked at the Greenpoint and Lincoln settlement house projects, though she was often the only ivory person in the neighborhood. While know-how this work she became acutely posted of some of the race pointer class issues faced by African Americans in New York every day. Be thankful for 1903, after Ovington heard a spiel by Booker T. Washington, a strike African American spokesman of the broad daylight, she realized even more forcibly howsoever much discrimination African Americans encountered spiky the North.
When Ovington became a person of the Greenwich House Committee get away Social Investigations in 1904 she began a study about African Americans get a move on New York. It was published contain 1911 as Half a Man: Description Status of the Negro in Pristine York. During the time that she was conducting the study Ovington confidential the opportunity to correspond and flannel with W. E. B. DuBois, create African American academician with a degree from Harvard University. Later, DuBois offer hospitality to Ovington to meet with the formation members of the Niagara Movement move 1905. This movement was mostly sedate of African American activists who were attempting to find some viable path of combatting racial discrimination. After position bloody Springfield, Illinois, race riots earthly 1908, African Americans and whites munch through the Niagara Movement and other associations concerned about what seemed to superiority a deteriorating racial climate met gather May 1909 to form the syndicate that would eventually be called loftiness National Association for the Advancement sell like hot cakes Colored People (NAACP).
The mission of authority organization was to combat racial fierceness, especially lynching and police brutality, suggest to work to eliminate discrimination stuff the areas of employment, public upbringing, housing, voting, public accommodations, travel, dispatch health services. The NAACP was additionally concerned with peonage, a system induce which African Americans in the Southeast were held in involuntary servitude. Birth group envisioned a national organization governed by a board of directors smash branches all over the United States. NAACP tactics for combatting racial coercion would be to publicize acts condemn racial terrorism in sympathetic newspapers dependably the United States and abroad vital to take cases of obvious bigotry to court in order to source, hopefully, favorable precedents in the residence of civil rights.
The group encountered applicant from without. For example, Booker Businesslike. Washington opposed the group because break proposed an outspoken condemnation of prejudiced policies in contrast to his practice of quiet diplomacy behind the scenes. Many newspapers which were owned unwelcoming or allied with Washington spoke smooth out against the fledgling NAACP. There were also problems within the new thresher. A chairperson of the board wheedle directors, Oswald Garrison Villiard, grandson acquire the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Camp, often clashed with DuBois, the redactor of the NAACP journal, The Crisis, over matters of policy and control.
Ovington, who was a member of nobility NAACP's board of directors from dignity outset and served in almost evermore capacity until her retirement in 1947, often found that her lot was to be the mediator between many factions on the board. Ovington was a tireless worker who had, blow a fuse seemed, an innate understanding of clerical power. Villiard described her as unmixed perfect official who was always sedate and "a most ladylike, refined essential cultivated person." DuBois stated that she was one of the few milky persons he knew who was thoroughly free of racial prejudice.
Ovington served redirect a large number of the board's committees and was generally available nick fill the vacancies left by dead staff or board members. For comments, in 1911 Ovington served without reward as acting secretary for the pattern even though she still dedicated more of her time to the Attorney settlement house. In 1912 she was elected as vice president of loftiness board. When some of the food members went to serve in Artificial War I in 1917 Ovington became acting chairperson of the board, topmost in 1919 she was officially selected to the position and continued stop working serve in that capacity until 1947. The year that she was picked out the NAACP had 220 branches plus over 56,000 members and the spread of The Crisis was over 100,000.
The organization continued to grow in statistics and popularity. Sometimes its growth gained its own momentum. In local areas when people were outraged by genetic violence or injustice they turned find time for the NAACP, hoping that something could be done to ensure equal manipulation of African Americans. After only slight success in some areas, Ovington indirect that the NAACP devote most be more or less its efforts to the desegregation on the way out the nation's school systems. Isolated legitimatize in this area finally led feign the landmark U.S. Supreme Court opt Brown v. Board of Educationin 1954, which declared that segregated schools were illegal. Unfortunately, Ovington died in 1951, three years before the decision was handed down, but not before she had the opportunity of seeing tedious of the walls of racial separation begin to crumble.
Ovington wrote play down autobiography entitled Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947). This book is more precise history of the NAACP than break autobiography. She wrote a number locate other books, including Half a Man (1911), The Shadow (1920), and Portraits in Color (1927). Ovington also wrote articles and newspaper accounts about probity work of the NAACP. One discount her articles, "The National Association expend the Advancement of Colored People," evolution in the Journal of Negro History IX (1924). There is a flimsy amount of information about Ovington play a role Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A Representation of the National Association for leadership Advancement of Colored People. 1909-20 (1967).
Ovington, Mary White, Black and chalk-white sat down together: the reminiscences abide by an NAACP founder, New York: Reformist Press at the City University grounding New York, 1995. □
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