CREATORS OF THE NAACP:
Storey, Ovington, and Du Bois
Oil, about 1984, 30 x 50 inches framed
Moorfield Storey,
lawyer and author, was born in Massachusetts in 1845 and studied
at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and in law offices. He
practiced law in Boston, where he was a reformer and a strong
supporter of civil rights. He wrote a number of books and pamphlets
including Legal Aspects of the Negro Question and Problems
of Today, in which he discussed race prejudice. He was among
the sixty prominent Americans who responded to the call of Mary
White Ovington to meet in February 1909, on the occasion of the
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, to protest
the recent frightening riot in Springfield, Illinois, and the
many decades of such oppressive acts of terror as burnings and
lynchings. He became the first national president of the NAACP.
Mary White Ovington, reformer and the spirit behind that meeting,
was born in Brooklyn in 1865, where she grew up in an atmosphere
of abolitionism and women's rights. She attended Packer Collegiate
Institute there before going to Radcliffe College for two years.
She worked in settlement houses and came to know the depth of
the problems of the blacks. In 1911, she published her 1904 study
Half a Man: The Status of the Negro. By that time, she
had seen her 1909 meeting evolve into the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People. For more than forty years
she served as board member, executive secretary, and chairman,
and served as conciliator among the various factions that threatened
to destroy the movement. Among her books was the autobiographical
The Walls Came Tumbling Down.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, scholar and activist, was born
in western Massachusetts in 1868. He attended local schools where
he was usually the only black. He went off to Fisk University,
graduated, and enrolled at Harvard College as a junior. He stayed
on through his doctorate in 1895. He taught at the University
of Pennsylvania while doing the research for his magisterial Philadelphia
Negro (1899). He taught at Atlanta University and became the
ideological rival to Booker T. Washington upon the publication
of his Souls of Black Folk. He was the first NAACP director
of research and publications and he founded Crisis of which
he was editor for two dozen years. He resigned when his independence
as editor was threatened. He taught at Atlanta, returned to the
NAACP for a stormy few years, and left again. He died as he had
lived, in controversy.
For additional facts about the NAACP, visit their website at
www.naacp.org.
