Ovington, Mary White (1865–1951)

The singularity of Mary White Ovington's presence in U.S. history is accounted for by the consistency and fullness of her dedication to the wide cause of integration: initially of immigrant white working-class people, and later, and for the better part of her life, of black Americans. As a white woman, her pioneer status in the championship of racial equality is unparalleled.

As a privileged private school student, Ovington had the opportunity to listen to Frederick Douglass in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York. He inspired in her the determination to serve the less fortunate. Upon graduation from Radcliffe College, in 1895, she started a settlement for immigrant white working poor in Greenpoint, the northernmost ward of Brooklyn, and did social work there for 7 years. During that time she joined and was subsequently elected to the board of the Social Reform Club, an organization of intellectuals and workers brought together by a socialist vision.

It was through this club that Ovington first became aware of the so-called Negro problem in her city. She vowed to work for its resolution. In 1903–1904, she secured a fellowship to study employment and housing problems in black Manhattan. This investigation resulted in a groundbreaking sociological study on the status of the black man in New York.

Ovington soon became a first-rate contributor on this subject to a number of publications. As a reporter for the Evening Post, in 1906 she attended the Niagara Movement, headed by W. E. B. Du Bois, whose close associate she had become.

Between 1904 and 1909, Ovington worked with the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York. Again attracted by settlement work, in 1908, she moved into Manhattan's Tuskegee Apartments as the only white resident in a block of 5,000 black people.

Ovington was instrumental in convening the National Conference of the Negro, held May 29–30, 1909. It passed resolutions that demanded the ballot, the same education for the coloreds as the whites, and [Page 1071]the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Ovington was elected a member of its National Negro Committee. The following year, the second National Negro Conference took place, in the preparation of which Ovington played a key role. It transformed the Committee into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

For the rest of her life, Ovington remained totally committed to the NAACP. In 1919, she was elected chair of the NAACP's Board of Directors, a position she resigned in 1932. Her book reviewing, fiction writing, travel, and various forms of support for talented black people were invariably linked to the NAACP goal of racial equality. A collection of biographical sketches of prominent black American men and women, which Ovington published in 1927, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.