W.E.B. Du Bois--biography of a race, 1868-1919 by Lewis David L. 1936-

Author:Lewis, David L., 1936-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963, African Americans, African Americans, African Americans, Civil rights movements
Publisher: New York : H. Holt
Published: 1993-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

NAACP

"race hatred," but "we at once discovered that Springfield had no shame," he lamented; but then neither did the nation. The issue was clear, the moment historic: "Either the spirit of the abolitionists, of Lincoln and of Lovejoy, must be revived and we must come to treat the negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality, or Vardaman and Tillman will soon have transferred the race war to the North." His final words about the widening persecution of African-Americans had taken the form of an anguished question: "Yet who realizes the seriousness of the situation, and what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their aid?"^ Race relations now constituted the American dilemma.

Mary Ovington had become obsessed with Wallings call to conscience. She had decided instantly to commit herself to creating that large and powerful body, writing Walling from her tenement in the San Juan Hill section of Manhattan that he must count on her. Walling was already counting on his close friend in the Liberal Club, Charles Russell, the Socialist reformer, investigative journalist, and muckraker novelist, to help him put together an organization of "fairminded whites and intelligent blacks." One Saturday in May 1908 at New York's Republican Club, Russell had listened to a judge, a minister, and a public official discourse on the race problem, and then Du Bois spoke and "eclipsed the rest." Twenty-five years later, Russell would remember that luncheon speech in minute detail. "In the logical and coherent arrangement of his matter, in apt illustration, in research and knowledge, in the polished and carefully chosen cameos of his language, in the faultless fluency of his utterance— unequalled." Henceforth Russell would be a Du Bois stalwart. But it was Ovington who supplied the start-up spark after meeting Walling at the close of his lecture on Russian politics at Cooper Union. Negroes were treated even worse than Jews in Russia, Walling had said, but as yet he had done little to put a stop to it. Pressed by her in the weeks that followed, he finally called a meeting in his New York apartment on West Thirty-ninth Street during the first week in 1909. Ovington was there, along with social worker Dr. Henry Moskowitz, but Russell was detained elsewhere. It was the seminal trio, "a descendant of an old-time abolitionist, the second a Jew, and the third a Southerner," Ovington recalled.^

Once he got going. Walling was a powerhouse, bringing into the group the cream of progressive reform—Ray Baker, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Reverend John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Villard, and several others. A manifesto or "call" was drafted, with Walling doing most of the writing; something dramatic yet not too radical was needed. Both Ovington

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