Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP

Born in Brooklyn in 1865, Mary White Ovington carried, throughout her long life, a fine sense of the abolitionist spirit that had so quickened her parents' generation. A lively but somewhat unfocused intellectual, she drifted through social circles and movements until, at the age of 36, she met the African American educator Booker T. Washington and, shortly afterward, the activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Her eyes, writes Carolyn Wedin, opened wider when she took a tour of the South in 1906, in the wake of a series of bloody race riots. Ovington returned to New York convinced that matters could improve for African Americans only through well-coordinated political organization that would demand, among other things, voting rights and social justice. In 1909, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Ovington issued a call to renew the struggle for political and civil liberty. Organizing parades, antilynching protests, and conferences, the resultant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People became an important vehicle for the emerging civil rights movement, one whose leaders and members endured many hardships as they spread their message across the country. As Inheritors of the Spirit reveals, Ovington's life stands as an example of moral courage and dedication to a noble cause. --Gregory McNamee