How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began

Mary White Ovington was there when the NAACP was born. As one of its seven founding members, she writes with the authority of someone who lived this history, not merely documented it. In this slim, impassioned volume from 1914, she traces the organization's origins to the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, when violence erupted in Abraham Lincoln's hometown, exposing the lie of post-Civil War racial progress. Ovington recounts how she, William English Walling, and Dr. Henry Moskowitz convened a small group of reformers in a New York City office, their urgent conversations giving birth to an organization that would become the cornerstone of American civil rights advocacy. The book captures the idealism and desperation of that moment, the recognition that separate spheres of black and white activism had failed, and that only unified, legal, and vocal resistance could challenge the rising tide of lynchings and disenfranchisement. Ovington also details the founding of The Crisis, the organization's voice under W.E.B. Du Bois's editorial stewardship. This is primary source history from a woman who helped make it, essential reading for understanding how a nation began to organize against its own racism.