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Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction | 323.1196 WED | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
This is the story of the founding of America's oldest civil rights organization. Premier among American civil rights organizations stands the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Much has been written on its guiding light and co-founder, W.E.B. Du Bois; however, few know about its other pioneers, notably the New York upper-middleclass feminist and social activist, Mary White Ovington. With her Unitarian background, her abolitionist heritage, investigation, and passion for justice, Ovington became an outspoken leader against racial violence and segregation in the early part of the 20th century.
Author Notes
CAROLYN WEDIN is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. She previously edited Black and White Sat Down Together: Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder by Mary White Ovington.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The early history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is generally associated with W.E.B. Du Bois, its charismatic leader, while the powerful influence of Mary White Ovington, a white feminist, on him and the organization is obscure. Ovington was the organization's cofounder, chairman of its board and unceasing activist on its behalf for 40 years. The daughter of an abolitionist Unitarian family living in New York City, Ovington became a settlement-house worker whose experiences led her to an increasing concern over the social costs of racial discrimination. The writings of Du Bois convinced her of the need for more aggressive civil rights actions than the gradualist approach of Booker T. Washington, and she became a friend and supporter of Du Bois and exerted a strong influence on him. Partly because her personal life was consumed by activities in favor of civil rights for blacks, this well-researched biography is more successful in presenting its subject's ideas, organizational skills, political maneuvers and the inner workings and accomplishments of the early NAACP than it is in bringing to life its genuine heroine. Photos. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A somewhat pedantic biography of a remarkable woman--author, journalist, socialist, feminist, and a founder of the NAACP. Despite her dry manner, Wedin (English/Univ. of Wisconsin, Whitewater) has thoroughly researched and recreated a life filled with drama. Ovington was born in 1865 in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in an abolitionist milieu, seized early on by an affinity for the Socialist Party and the working class, she also enjoyed a life of privilege and an education that led to the Annex, a college-level institution for women that was eventually renamed Radcliffe College. Ovington rejected the usual choices--marriage or domesticity with her parents--instead establishing a settlement house in Brooklyn; from there she moved to what was then a Negro neighborhood in Manhattan with plans for another settlement, beginning her dedication to the cause of black rights and opportunities, which engaged her until she died at age 86. For advice, she wrote to activist and author W.E.B. DuBois, beginning a friendship that was to last the rest of their lives. Race riots in Atlanta and Springfield, Ill., galvanized her to join with William English Walling, a southern white man, and Henry Moskowitz, a social worker, in launching the NAACP. She contacted her many black friends and acquaintances, and within five months, in May 1909, the fledging organization drew 1,500 people to its first public meeting. Ovington traveled, wrote, recruited, and organized among both blacks and whites for the next 40 years; she served as NAACP chairwoman for more than a decade. While she believed in educating blacks and whites about each other, she also advocated using the courts, the Congress, and grass-roots organizing to end racism. Overshadowed by others then and now, Ovington is revealed to be a courageous and politically astute woman, a ``torch-bearer,'' as Wedin calls her, against oppression and discrimination. (b&w photos, not seen)
Booklist Review
Little is written about Mary White Ovington, one of the original founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; instead, most books and articles about the early days of the NAACP tend to focus on W. E. B. Dubois. Wedin, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, tries to correct that oversight in this impassioned biography of Ovington's life and work, in which she details how, in the aftermath of some of America's worst race riots, Ovington, a white, upper-middle-class feminist, became a leader in the fight to end segregation and racial violence in this country. Wedin describes Ovington's transformation from leading a comfortable life of relative privilege to one of social research and, finally, to zealous civil rights activism. In this interesting portrayal of Ovington's unconventional life and work, the author also describes the difficulties Ovington encountered as a white woman working within a black organization and details her relationships with other activists, notably Dubois and Booker T. Washington. --Kathleen Hughes
Library Journal Review
By highlighting the life of a key figure in the NAACP who until now has been largely treated as a footnote, Wedin (English, Univ. of Wisconsin at Whitewater) has given us a welcome addition to the literature on that organization. Mary White Ovington was born into relative privilege and comfort at the end of the Civil War and like other members of her class had a "hatred of dirt, odor, [and] ill health." But unlike most of her peers, rather than avoid these problems she dedicated her life to doing something about them. Through her work in settlement houses, she saw that the problems facing poor African Americans were different from those facing their white counterparts. Other settlement workers either failed to recognize or failed to act on America's "race problem," but Ovington made it her life's work. As a founding member of the NAACP and a lifelong advocate of integration, she distinguished herself as a leader in the fight for social, racial, and economic equality. Wedin also explores Ovington's lifelong relationship to the organization she helped found and with such notable figures as W.E.B. DuBois and the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard. Highly recommended.Roseanne Castellino, D'Youville Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Finding Her Avenue |
Taking Root |
From Social Researcher to Activist |
White Woman in a Colored World |
The NAACP Is Born |
Growing Pains |
Chairman of the Board |
Catalyst to the Harlem Renaissance |
Rifts and Evolution |
Traveling Fund-Raiser |
"Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing." |
Notes |
Bibliography |
Index |