OVINGTON, Mary White

Born 11 April 1865, Brooklyn, New York; died 15 July 1951, Newton, Massachusetts

Daughter of Theodore T. and Louise Vetcham Ovington

The daughter of a well-to-do New York family, Mary White Ovington was raised by abolitionists and radicals. Her education at Radcliffe College (1891-93) was followed by two years in society, after which Ovington worked as registrar at the Pratt Institute, and then opened the Greenpoint Settlement of the Pratt Institute Neighborhood Association, where she served as headworker from 1895 to 1903.

Ovington's 50 years of work in the cause of full equality for black Americans began with Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (1911). Begun by Ovington while she was a Greenwich House fellow in 1904-05, the interviews and research in New York and in the South continued for seven years. Meanwhile, she had also convinced Henry Phipps to build the Tuskegee in New York City as an experiment in model housing for blacks; had caused a national sensation as the central white female participant in the 1908 interracial Cosmopolitan Club dinner at Peck's Restaurant; had cofounded the Lincoln Settlement for Negroes with Verina Morton-Jones, a black physician; and had been the leading figure in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Work with the NAACP was to consume Ovington's energies for the rest of her life. She was dubbed "Fighting Saint," "Saint Mary," and "Mother of the New Emancipation" by people in and out of the organization. Able to get along with almost everyone, Ovington was described by coworkers as sensitive, modest, shy, retiring, but fearless and unshakable wherever she encountered injustice, poverty, or exploitation.

Ovington's major writing can be grouped into sociological study, children's books, fiction, drama, and biography/autobiography. Half a Man is a highly readable and insightful sociological study of what was in 1911 a nearly invisible minority populace. It gives a thorough picture of the differences between white and black women's roles early in the 20th century, and provides a rare early depiction of the peculiar burdens and strengths of the American black woman.

Ovington wrote two books and helped edit another to fill the gap she perceived in literature for black children. Hazel (1913), a novel for girls, was dramatized and performed at the YWCA in Brooklyn in 1916. Zeke: A School Boy at Tolliver (1931), was written for boys. With Myron Pritchard, Ovington compiled The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children (1920), an excellent collection of stories and poems by black writers.

Notable in Ovington's fiction is a short story, "The White Brute," printed in the Masses in 1915 and also in her autobiography. Based on actual incident, the story seeks to realistically reverse the image of the "black brute" so often touted in the South as excuse for lynching. Dialogue and description are effectively done. The Shadow (1920) combines Ovington's interests in race problems and the labor movement.

Of her two plays, The Awakening (1923) and Phillis Wheatley (1932), the latter, shorter play remains the less dated. The Awakening is primarily a propaganda piece for the NAACP. Phillis Wheatley is based on letters of the 18th-century black poet to her friend Obour Tanner, and on the biographical notes prefacing editions of Wheatley's poems.

Ovington's other two long books, Portraits in Color (1927) and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947), show again the clear, appealing writing style evident in Half a Man. Portraits in Color depicts the life and work of 20 black men and women. The Walls Came Tumbling Down is Ovington's autobiography, concentrating not so much on the inward person as on her political activities. It provides an excellent personalized picture of the early days of the NAACP and the people, black and white, who helped push down walls of discrimination and exploitation.

Other Works:

Most of the papers of Mary White Ovington are in the NAACP collection of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

Bibliography:

Archer, L., Black Images in the American Theatre: NAACP Protest Campaigns—Stage, Screen, Radio, and Television (1973). Hughes, L., Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (1962). Kellogg, C. F., Introduction to Half a Man by Ovington (1969). Kellogg, C. F., NAACP: A History of theNational Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (1967). Ross, B. J., J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (1972).

—CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER