Mrs. Mary “White” Ovington was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1865, she was a suffragette, socialist, Unitarian, journalist and a vice president and co-founder of the NAACP, National Association Advancement of Colored People. As the board member, executive secretary and chairman. With her influence The NAACP fought a long legal battle against segregation and racial discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting and transportation. Through books and articles she shares perspectives on the universal relevance of the need to “campaign for black civil rights” because she sees the challenges beyond racial identity as a human rights issues.

Mrs. Ovington wrote a profound article, in The Crisis magazine of January 1915, titled “Segregation”, which was fifty years after the end of slavery and forty years before the Civil Rights movement, placing her perspective dead center in a much bigger plan. The case she makes for “civil rights” and how “black people” should be treated, was extremely progressive back then and would be highly controversial now, especially from a white woman.

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Segregation

By Mary “White” Ovington

(The Crisis, January 1915)

Repost: 3/11/2018

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Original Post 3/9/18 8:03 am

“Mary White Ovington could have lived a life of comfort. Born into privilege, she could have conformed to the prejudices of her time. Instead, she chose to stand on the frontlines of history—fighting for justice alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black leaders. Without her, the NAACP might not exist as we know it today.”

The Making of an Activist

Mary White Ovington (April 11, 1865 – July 15, 1951) was a suffragette, socialist, journalist, and co-founder of the NAACP. Raised in Brooklyn by Unitarian parents who were staunch abolitionists and women’s rights advocates, Ovington’s life was shaped by the values of justice and equality.

Her journey into civil rights began in 1890 when she heard Frederick Douglass speak in a Brooklyn church. Inspired by his words, she devoted herself to fighting racial injustice.

The Springfield Race Riot & the Birth of the NAACP

In 1908, Ovington came across an article titled “Race War in the North” by William English Walling. The article detailed the Springfield Race Riot, where white mobs targeted Black communities in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown—leaving seven dead and dozens of homes and businesses destroyed.

Realizing that Black Americans needed a powerful interracial organization to fight racial violence and discrimination, she met with Walling and Dr. Henry Moskowitz in New York. Together, they issued a call for action that led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Mary White Ovington’s Leadership in the NAACP

Unlike many white allies of her time, Ovington didn’t just support the movement—she helped build it. She served as the NAACP’s executive secretary and later as its chair, working closely with Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson.

Through her books, articles, and public advocacy, she championed civil rights, women’s suffrage, and the labor movement. Her 1911 book, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York, challenged the nation’s racial inequalities.

Legacy: Why Mary White Ovington’s Story Matters Today

Mary White Ovington wasn’t just a historical figure—her work remains relevant today. She understood that Black progress was tied to national progress and that the fight for justice required both Black and white allies working together.

She once wrote:
“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.”

As discussions about allyship, racial justice, and history’s erasure continue in 2024, Ovington’s bold stance against racism and her role in co-founding the NAACP should be remembered and celebrated.

Call to Action

Did you know about Mary White Ovington’s role in founding the NAACP? What are your thoughts on allyship today? Drop a comment below!

For further research:

The Walls Come Tumbling Down (Mary White Ovington, 1947)

Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP (Mary White Ovington, republished 1996)

• Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (Mary White Ovington, 1911)
• Listen to the Episode Featuring Mrs. Ovington [The Last Historian Episode 1 part 1]

Must Watch: 

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“Our system of government demands for its smooth functioning and permanency an intelligent and well-informed citizenry. Our citizens must have the knowledge, the desire and the will to elect the proper kind of men as public officials. Political charlatans are always ready to take advantage of uninformed voters. Our citizens must have wide information to understand the economic and political problems of the day. Wireless, radio and aviation have made time and space negligible factors in modern life. What happens in any part of the world is known almost instantaneously everywhere else and expects an immediate effect.”

The daily newspaper (today social media & television) has become a universal means of keeping people informed. The radio too, has become an important means of gaining access to the public. Since it is easy for men of wealth and power to use the newspaper and radio (today television & social media) as instruments of propaganda, the average citizen must be able to differentiate between truth and falsehood, he must not permit himself to be a victim of rumor propaganda and downright misrepresentation and falsehood. He must read his newspapers (watch TV and post) with intelligence and discrimination, to quote Henry Wallace, “In the democracy of tomorrow, people will have to be intelligently free from prejudice that neither the wealthy, interested in private control of government for personal ends, nor demagogues, interested in their jobs, will be able to create deception and illusion.”

(Excerpts from the Rosicrucian Digest, July 1941)

Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston was commissioned to photograph Tuskegee in 1902. This photograph shows a history class learning about Native Americans and Captain John Smith in Virginia.

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Reference: History Channel Magazine “Secret Societies” single issue, display until September 9, 2016 bought at Wal-Mart.

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Excerpts from “Deceptions, Schemes & Animosity“, also see instagram feed.

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The men of the Niagara Movement coming from the toil of the year’s hard work and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily bread turn toward the nation and again ask again, in the name of ten million, the privilege of a hearing.

In the past year the work of the Negro-hater has flourished in the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man’s ballot has progressed and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation’s capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies. Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or title less than our full manhood rights!

We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America! The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth, the land of the thief and the home of the slave, a byword and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments.

Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow citizens born and bred on it soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness, the new American creed says: “Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white.” And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ! The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice.

In detail, our demands are clear and unequivocal. First, we would vote; with the right to vote goes everything: freedom, manhood, the honor of your wives, the chastity of your daughters, the right to work, and the chance to rise, and let no man listen to those who deny this.

We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever!

Second. We want discrimination in public accommodation to cease. Separation in railway and street cars, based simply on race and color, is un-American, undemocratic, and silly.

Third. We claim the right of freemen to walk, talk, and be with them that wish to be with us. No man has a right to choose another man’s friends, and to attempt to do so is an impudent interference with the most fundamental human privilege.

Fourth. We want the laws enforced against rich as well as poor; against capitalist as well as laborer; against white as well as black. We are not more lawless than the white race: We are more often arrested, convicted and mobbed. We want Congress to take charge of Congressional elections. We want the Fourteenth Amendment carried out to the letter and every state disfranchised in Congress which attempts to disfranchise its rightful voters. We want the Fifteenth Amendment enforced and no state allowed to base its franchise simply on color.

The failure of the Republican Party in Congress at the session just closed to redeem its pledge…to suffrage conditions in the South seems a plain, deliberate, and premeditated breach of promise, and stamps that Party as guilty of obtaining votes under false pretense.

Fifth. We want our children educated. The school system in the country districts of the South is a disgrace, and in few towns and cities are the Negro schools what they ought to be. We want the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in the South. Either the United States will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States.

And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire.

These are some of the chief things which we want. How shall we get them? By voting where we may vote, by persistent, unceasing agitation, by hammering at the truth, by sacrifice and work.

We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence of the raid nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous of the mob, but we do believe in John Brown, in that incarnate spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of right. And here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom, we deconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free.

Our enemies, triumphant for the present, are fighting the stars in their courses.  Justice and humanity must prevail. We live to tell these dark brothers of ours–scattered in counsel, wavering, and weak–that no bribe of money or notoriety, no promise of wealth or fame, is worth the surrender of a people’s manhood or the loss of a man’s self-respect. We refuse to surrender the leadership of this race to cowards and trucklers. We are men; we will be treated as men. On this rock we have planted our banners. We will never give up, though the trump of doom finds us still fighting.

And we shall win! The past promised it. The present foretells it. Thank God for John Brown. Thank God for Garrison and Douglass, Sumner and Phillips, Nat Turner and Robert Gould Shaw, and all the hallowed dead who died for freedom. Thank God for all those today, few though their voices be, who have not forgotten the divine brotherhood of all men, white and black, rich and poor, fortunate and unfortunate.

We appeal to the young men and women of this nation, to those whose nostrils are not yet befouled by greed and snobbery and racial narrowness: Stand up for the right, prove yourselves worthy of your heritage and, whether born North or South, dare to treat men as men. Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten-million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten-million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?

Courage, brothers! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing. All across the skies sit signs of promise! The Slave is rising in his might, the yellow millions are tasting liberty, the black Africans are writhing toward the light, and everywhere the laborer, with ballot in his hand, is voting open the gates of opportunity and peace.

The morning breaks over blood-stained hills. We must not falter, we may not shrink.

Above are the everlasting stars.

See more at: https://www.blackpast.org/1906-w-e-b-dubois-men-niagara#sthash.awV8w1Td.dpuf

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Tuskegee Institute was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 under a charter from the Alabama legislature for the purpose of training teachers in Alabama. Tuskegee’s program provided students with both academic and vocational training. The students, under Washington’s direction, built their own buildings, produced their own food, and provided for most of their own basic necessities. The Tuskegee faculty utilized each of these activities to teach the students basic skills that they could share with African American communities throughout the South.

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Knowledge is power…

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