Mary White Ovington
Encyclopedia
Suffragette
"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
, socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
, Unitarian
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, and co-founder of the NAACP.
Biography
Mary White Ovington was born April 11, 1865 in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents, members of the Unitarian ChurchAmerican Unitarian Association
The American Unitarian Association was a religious denomination in the United States and Canada, formed by associated Unitarian congregations in 1825. In 1961, it merged with the Universalist Church of America to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.According to Mortimer Rowe, the Secretary...
were supporters of women's rights
Women's rights
Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...
and had been involved in anti-slavery movement. Educated at Packer Collegiate Institute
Packer Collegiate Institute
Packer Collegiate Institute is an independent college preparatory school for students from prekindergarten through grade 12. Formerly the Brooklyn Female Academy, Packer has been located at 170 Joralemon Street in the historic district of Brooklyn Heights since its founding in 1845.- History :A...
and Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...
, Ovington became involved in the campaign for civil rights in 1890 after hearing Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...
speak in a Brooklyn church.
In 1895 she helped found the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn. Appointed head of the project the following year, Ovington remained until 1904 when she was appointed fellow of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations. Over the next five years she studied employment and housing problems in black Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. During her investigations she met W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois attended Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate...
, from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and was introduced to the founding members of the Niagara Movement
Niagara Movement
The Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and Niagara Falls, the Canadian side of which was where the first meeting took...
.
Influenced by the ideas of William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, Ovington joined the Socialist Party in 1905, where she met people such as Daniel De Leon
Daniel De Leon
Daniel DeLeon was an American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. He is regarded as the forefather of the idea of revolutionary industrial unionism and was the leading figure in the Socialist Labor Party of America from 1890 until the time of...
, Asa Philip Randolph, Floyd Dell
Floyd Dell
Floyd Dell was an American author and critic.-Biography:Floyd Dell was born in Barry, Illinois on June 28, 1887....
, Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
and Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
, who argued that racial problems were as much a matter of class as of race. She wrote for radical journals and newspapers such as The Masses
The Masses
The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the U.S. from 1911 until 1917, when Federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later The New Masses...
, New York Evening Post and the New York Call. She also worked with Ray Stannard Baker
Ray Stannard Baker
Ray Stannard Baker , also known by his pen name David Grayson, was an American journalist and author born in Lansing, Michigan...
and influenced the content of his book, Following the Color Line, published in 1908.
On September 3, 1908 she read an article written by socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
William English Walling
William English Walling
William English Walling was an American labor reformer and socialist born in Louisville, Kentucky. He was the grandson of William Hayden English, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1880, and was born into wealth. He was educated at the University of Chicago and at Harvard Law School...
entitled "Race War in the North" in The Independent. Walling described a massive race riot
Mass racial violence in the United States
Mass racial violence, also called race riots can include such disparate events as:* attacks on Irish Catholics, the Chinese and other immigrants in the 19th century....
directed at black residents in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
, Springfield, Illinois
Springfield Race Riot of 1908
The Springfield Race Riot of 1908 was a mass civil disturbance in Springfield, Illinois, USA sparked by the transfer of two African American prisoners out of the city jail by the county sheriff. This act enraged many white citizens, who responded by burning black-owned homes and businesses and...
that led to seven deaths, 40 homes and 24 businesses destroyed, and 107 indictments against rioters. Walling ended the article by calling for a powerful body of citizens to come to the aid of blacks. Ovington responded to the article by writing Walling and meeting at his apartment in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
along with social worker Dr. Henry Moskowitz
Henry Moskowitz
Henry Moskowitz was a civil rights activist, and one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.-Biography:He was born in 1879 in Romania....
. The group decided to launch a campaign by issuing a "call" for a national conference on the civil and political rights
Rights
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory...
of African-Americans on the centennial of Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1909.
Many people responded to the “call” that eventually led to the formation of the National Negro Committee
National Negro Committee
The National Negro Committee was composed of a group of activists, in order to address the social, economic, and political rights of African-Americans...
that held its first meeting in New York on May 31 and June 1, 1909. By May, 1910 the National Negro Committee and attendants, at its second conference, organized a permanent body known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP) where Ovington was appointed as its executive secretary. Early members included Josephine Ruffin
Josephine Ruffin
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was an American publisher, journalist, African American civil rights leader, suffragist, and editor for Women’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for African American women...
, Mary Talbert, Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell , daughter of former slaves, was one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She became an activist who led several important associations and worked for civil rights and suffrage....
, Inez Milholland
Inez Milholland
Inez Milholland Boissevain was a suffragist, labor lawyer, World War I correspondent, and public speaker who greatly influenced the women's movement in America.-Biography:...
, Jane Addams
Jane Addams
Jane Addams was a pioneer settlement worker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in woman suffrage and world peace...
, George Henry White
George Henry White
George Henry White was a Republican U.S. Congressman from North Carolina between 1897 and 1901. He is considered the last African American Congressman of the Reconstruction era, although his election came twenty years after the era's "official" end...
, W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois attended Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate...
, Charles Edward Russell
Charles Edward Russell
Charles Edward Russell was an American journalist, politician, and a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
, John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, Charles Darrow
Charles Darrow
Charles Brace Darrow was born in Philadelphia; he is best known as the purported inventor of the Monopoly board game. Darrow was a domestic heater salesman from Germantown, a neighborhood in Philadelphia during the Great Depression. The house he lived in still stands at 40 Westview Street...
, Lincoln Steffens
Lincoln Steffens
-Biography:Steffens was born April 6, 1866, in San Francisco. He grew up in a wealthy family and attended a military academy. He studied in France and Germany after graduating from the University of California....
, Ray Stannard Baker
Ray Stannard Baker
Ray Stannard Baker , also known by his pen name David Grayson, was an American journalist and author born in Lansing, Michigan...
, Fanny Garrison Villard
Fanny Garrison Villard
300px|thumb|Fanny Garrison Villard at the International Woman Suffrage Congress, Budapest, 1913.Helen Frances “Fanny” Garrison Villard was a women's suffrage campaigner and a co-founder of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
, Oswald Garrison Villard
Oswald Garrison Villard
Oswald Garrison Villard was an American journalist. He provided a rare direct link between the anti-imperialism of the late 19th century and the conservative Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s.-Biography:...
and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
The following year Ovington attended the Universal Races Congress in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Ovington remained active in the struggle for women's suffrage
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
and as a pacifist opposed America's involvement in the First World War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. During the war Ovington supported Asa Philip Randolph and his magazine, The Messenger (later the Black Worker), which campaigned for black civil rights.
After the war, Ovington served the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
as board member, executive secretary and chairman. The NAACP fought a long legal battle against segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
and racial discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting and transportation. They appealed to the Supreme Court to rule that several laws passed by southern states were unconstitutional and won three important judgments between 1915-1923 concerning voting rights and housing.
The NAACP was criticised by some members of the African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
community. Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
opposed the group because it proposed an outspoken condemnation of racist policies in contrast to his policy of quiet diplomacy behind the scenes. Members of the organization were physically attacked by white racists. John R. Shillady, executive secretary of the NAACP, was badly beaten up when he visited Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
in 1919.
Ovington wrote several books and articles, including a study of black Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, Half a Man
Half A Man
Half a Man is Stephen Lynch's original demo studio album and is currently out of print.-Track listing:#Half a Man#A Month Dead#Priest#Kill a Kitten#Mighty Hermaphrodite...
(1911); Status of the Negro in the United States (1913); Socialism and the Feminist Movement (1914); an anthology for black children, The Upward Path (1919); biographical sketches of prominent African Americans, Portraits in Color (1927); an autobiography, Reminiscences (1932); and a history of the NAACP, The Walls Came Tumbling Down
The Walls Came Tumbling Down
The Walls Came Tumbling Down is a film script written by author Robert Anton Wilson, first published in book form in 1997.-Plot summary:...
(1947).
Ovington retired as a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
in 1947, ending 38 years of service with the organization. She died on July 15, 1951.
Mary White Ovington I.S.30 Middle School in Brooklyn, New York was named after Mary White Ovington. She is on of the persons named on The Extra Mile
The Extra Mile
The Extra Mile - Points of Light Volunteer Pathway is a national monument installed in the sidewalks of Washington D.C.. The markers form a one-mile walking path through an area bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue, 15th Street, G Street, and 11th Street, NW...
-- Points of Light Volunteer Pathway NAtional Memorial in Washington, DC.
Works
- Half a Man. The Status of the Negro in New York (foreword by Franz BoasFranz BoasFranz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
), 1911. Various reprints. - Status of the Negro in the United States, 1913.
- Socialism and the Feminist Movement, 1914
- The Upwarth Path (an anthology), 1919
- The Shadow, 1920.
- The Awakening (a play), 1923
- Portraits in Color, 1927.
- Reminiscences, or Going Back 40 Years, published in the Baltimore Afro-American, from September 17, 1932 to February 25, 1933.
- The Walls Came Tumbling Down, 1947.
- Black and White Sat Down Together, 1995.