Mary White Ovington

Mary White Ovington was born on April 11, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York. Ovington was one of four children raised in a socially and politically progressive household. Many members of her family had been active in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. Ovington first attended the Packer Collegiate Institute and then continued her studies at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She had leave school in 1893 before completing her degree because the family ran into some financial difficulty. Back in Brooklyn, Ovington soon began her life of social work.

In the mid-1890s, Ovington helped the poor at what became known as the Greenpoint Settlement. In addition to her social work at Greenpoint, she began studying the lives of African Americans living in New York at the time. Her research would result in the 1911 book “Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York”. Ovington stated "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."

After hearing a 1903 speech by Booker T. Washington, Ovington devoted herself to racial equality. But in 1904, she left Greenpoint because she came down with typhoid and spent a year recuperating from her illness. During this time, she began exchanging letters with W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1908, she read an article about a racial attack in Springfield, Illinois on the town’s African American residents. The riot left seven people dead and destroyed dozens of homes and business. The article asked for people to unite in support of African Americans.

Ovington contacted the writer of the article, William Walling, and she met with him and Dr. Henry Moskowitz. They created plans to hold a special conference, which became known as the National Negro Committee. The first conference was held in New York in 1909. They held another meeting the following year, during which a new organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed. Made up of both blacks and whites, the NAACP was a picture of racial harmony. As one of the group's founders, Ovington became the NAACP's first executive secretary and a member of its board. Her friend W.E.B. Du Bois served as the organization's director of publicity and research and ran its publication “The Crisis”.

In 1947, Ovington was forced to resign from the NAACP due to poor health. She died on July 15, 1951, in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. Besides her many contributions to the NAACP, Ovington left behind an extensive body of work. In addition to “Half a Man”, she is remembered for her books “Status of the Negro in the United States” (1913); “Socialism and the Feminist Movement” (1914); “The Upward Path” (1919), an anthology for black children; “Portraits in Color” (1927), a collection of biographical sketches of prominent African Americans; and “The Walls Came Tumbling Down”, a history of the NAACP.