Background

Mary White Ovington was born on April 11, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York, United States to the family of an abolitionist reformer Theodore Tweedy Ovington and an owner of a glass and china importing firm and an abolitionist reformer Ann Louise Ketcham. She was the daughter of wealthy parents who raised her in the tradition of those men and women who had worked for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Two of the family heroes were abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Her beliefs in social reform and women’s rights were also shaped by the Reverend John White Chadwick of the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

Education

Mary White Ovington was educated at Packer Collegiate Institute in 1888-1891 and Radcliffe College in 1891-1893. At Radcliffe College Ovington was thoroughly tutored in the socialist school of thought and subsequently felt that racial problems were as much a matter of class as of race. The depression of 1893 necessitated her withdrawal from school.

Career

When Mary White Ovington returned to New York in 1891 after her family suffered financial reverses, Ovington lived and worked at the Greenpoint and Lincoln settlement house projects, although she was often the only white person in the neighborhood. While doing this work she became acutely aware of some of the race and class issues faced by African Americans in New York every day. In 1903, after Ovington heard a speech by Booker T. Washington, a prominent African American spokesman of the day, she realized even more forcibly how much discrimination African Americans encountered in the North.

When Ovington became a fellow of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations in 1904 she began a study about African Americans in New York. It was published in 1911 as Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York. During the time that she was conducting the study, Ovington had the opportunity to correspond and talk with W. E. B. DuBois, an African American academician with a doctorate from Harvard University. Later, DuBois invited Ovington to meet with the founding members of the Niagara Movement in 1905. This movement was mostly composed of African American activists who were attempting to find some viable means of combatting racial discrimination. After the bloody Springfield, Illinois, race riots of 1908, African Americans and whites from the Niagara Movement and other groups concerned about what seemed to be a deteriorating racial climate met in May 1909 to form the organization that would eventually be called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The group encountered opposition from without. For example, Booker T. Washington opposed the group because it proposed an outspoken condemnation of racist policies in contrast to his policy of quiet diplomacy behind the scenes. Many newspapers which were owned by or allied with Washington spoke out against the fledgling NAACP. There were also problems within the new association. A chairperson of the board of directors, Oswald Garrison Villiard, grandson of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, often clashed with DuBois, the editor of the NAACP journal, The Crisis, over matters of policy and control.

Ovington, who was a member of the NAACP's board of directors from the outset and served in almost every capacity until her retirement in 1947, often found that her lot was to be the mediator between various factions on the board. Ovington was a tireless worker who had, it seemed, an innate understanding of organizational power. Villiard described her as a perfect official who was always unruffled and "a most ladylike, refined and cultivated person." DuBois stated that she was one of the few white persons he knew who was totally free of racial prejudice.

Ovington served on a large number of the board's committees and was generally available to fill the vacancies left by departed staff or board members. For example, in 1911 Ovington served without pay as acting secretary for the association even though she still dedicated much of her time to the Lincoln settlement house. In 1912 she was elected as vice president of the board. When some of the board members went to serve in World War I in 1917 Ovington became acting chairperson of the board, and in 1919 she was officially elected to the position and continued to serve in that capacity until 1947. The year that she was elected the NAACP had 220 branches and over 56,000 members and the circulation of The Crisis was over 100,000.

The organization continued to grow in numbers and popularity. Sometimes its growth gained its own momentum. In local areas when people were outraged by racial violence or injustice, they turned to the NAACP, hoping that something could be done to ensure equal treatment of African Americans. After only minimal success in some areas, Ovington suggested that the NAACP devote most of its efforts to the desegregation of the nation's school systems. Isolated successes in this area finally led to the landmark the United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 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 some of the walls of racial discrimination begin to crumble.

She wrote several books and articles including a study of black Manhattan, Half a Man (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 Come Tumbling Down (1947).

Ovington retired as a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1947 and in doing so, ended decades of service with the organization.

Achievements

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  Mary White Ovington was one of the white reformers who joined African Americans in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and played a significant role in fighting racial discrimination in the United States. Her legacy can be seen throughout the organization's history and the future of the NACCP and its activism and push for social justice and policy that reflects that change. The organization was active during the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently Ovington's dream for social justice can be seen in the work with the NAACP is doing regarding changing the immigration law through activism and legal litigation.
  
  Mary White Ovington I.S. 30 Middle School in Brooklyn was named in her honor. She is one of the persons named on The Extra Mile - Points of Light Volunteer Pathway National Memorial in Washington, D.C. In 2009 she was depicted on a United States postage stamp with Mary Church Terrell.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Upward Path: A Reader For Colored Children

    (Words, phrases, and even ideas that were commonplace and ...)

    1920
  • Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder

    ( In 1903, when white settlement worker Mary White Ovingt...)

    1930
  • Hazel

    (The trials of a young Boston black girl spending a winter...)

    1913
  • Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York

    (Ovington's description of the Status of the Negro in New ...)

    1911
  • Portraits in Color

    (Portraits of 20 distinguished African-Americans by the co...)

    1927
  • How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began 1914
  • The Walls Came Tumbling Down 1947

Religion

Mary White Ovington was strongly influenced by her religious mentor Reverend John White Chadwick. It is hard to overestimate the influence of Unitarianism on her. Her childhood Brooklyn church, Second Unitarian, had been in the forefront in the Abolitionist battle against American slavery. And this was her religious education that shaped her social-political views.

Ovington was tightly connected with the church until her death. A memorial service for her was held at the Unitarian Community Church in New York City and was led by Reverend Donald Harrington. Her ashes reside in the chapel there.

Politics

Influenced by the ideas of William Morris, Ovington joined the Socialist Party of America in 1905. She, as a pacifist, opposed the United States involvement in the First World War. Although she was a radical socialist, Ovington subordinated her leftist political opinions to the needs of the NAACP and the goal of racial integration. Moreover, she criticized the socialist movement for being male-dominated and called for women to unite to destroy “masculine despotism.” At the NAACP she attempted to bring black women into positions of power and influence and worked closely with friends in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). During the later stages of the campaign for women’s suffrage, as chair of the board of the NAACP, Ovington encouraged the Woman’s Party and other voting-rights organizations to include black women and pressured them not to give in to any compromise that would disenfranchise half of the black voters.

Views

Mary White Ovington was one of those who formed the organization that would eventually be called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The mission of the organization was to combat racial violence, especially lynching and police brutality, and to work to eliminate discrimination in the areas of employment, public education, housing, voting, public accommodations, travel, and health services. The NAACP was also concerned with peonage, a system by which African Americans in the South were held in involuntary servitude. The group envisioned a national organization governed by a board of directors with branches all over the United States. NAACP tactics for combatting racial problems would be to publicize acts of racial terrorism in sympathetic newspapers in the United States and abroad and to take cases of obvious discrimination to court in order to establish, hopefully, favorable precedents in the area of civil rights.

Quotations: "If we deny full expression to a race, if we restrict its education, stifle its intellectual and aesthetic impulses, we make it impossible to fairly gauge its ability."

"The history of the progressive is one of dodging the race issue whenever possible."

"I should like to hammer that side of things into some of the aristocrats who are in the membership."

"Judas is not at the bottom of my inferno."

"These are difficult days, but there is always hope."

"They should know the power the race has gained."

"How interesting history would be if instead of tracing power through nations we traced power through production and distribution."

"I fear the world that goes on: the few holding the flowers of the earth, gripping them with their hot hands, while the little children grope among the nettles for food. The new man is not growing in America. But the bombs are growing."

"I don’t believe that there are any fixed moral issues - no eternal verities. Man is an animal with very finite limitations - physical and intellectual. What is important to him one century - ’moral’ to the extent of burning his fellowmen for differing with him - becomes utterly unimportant in the next century. Much that seems true today will not seem true tomorrow. Life is a matter of values."

Personality

Ovington was a tireless worker who had, it seemed, an innate understanding of organizational power. Villiard described her as a perfect official who was always unruffled and a most ladylike, refined and cultivated person. DuBois stated that she was one of the few white persons he knew who was totally free of racial prejudice.

Connections

Mary White Ovington was never married and had no children.

Father:

Theodore Tweedy Ovington

Mother:

Ann Louise Ketcham

mentor:

John White Chadwick

The minister for the first forty years of Mary White Ovington’s life, John White Chadwick, was radical even for a Unitarian. A firm rationalist who disliked “religious sentimentalism,” he felt called to demonstrate “the essential piety of science.” He was a strong influence on Mary in her growing years. In a poem, she called him “preacher, poet, man, and friend.” After he died she wrote that Chadwick “never lost an opportunity in speech or in writing to show his full sympathy with the colored man.”

References

• Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP This is the untold story of the founding of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization. Viewed through the life of co-founder, Mary White Ovington.
  1999
• NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909-1920 The history of NAACP by Charles Flint Kellogg.
  1967
• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998