Founding of the NAACP
Title
Founding of the NAACP
Description
The building where @NAACP and The Crisis were founded, and where W.E.B.DuBois wrote editorials supporting voting rights for women, still stands. 20 Vesey Street was built in 1907 as the headquarters of the New York Evening Post and the Nation. 🧵
The paper and the magazine were owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of WmLloydGarrison and heir to a railroad fortune.
Villard wrote “The Call” - a manifesto published on Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday that led to the founding of the NAACP. Villard was white, as were most of the luminaries that signed The Call and convened the conference from which NAACP grew. They envisioned an interracial organization fighting lynching and segregation.
White people had created the problem, Villard believed, and they should help fix it.
The conveners were sure they were doing a good thing, and they were people unused to being challenged. So they were startled when #IdaBWells and Monroe Trotter questioned them about their motives, their sincerity, and their desire to placate Booker T Washington.
For Ida’s willingness - as ever - to say the uncomfortable thing, disrupt the pleasant proceedings, demand accountability, she ended up on the outs. No one had done more to fight lynching, one of NAACP’s key issues, but Ida was only grudgingly added to the founders' roster.
From the very beginning, NAACP had detractors to its left and to its right, but it grew steadily from the two-room office in the Post building where DuBois worked, and Oswald Garrison Villard & Mary White Ovington fundraised. Take a look 👇#Suffrage100
The paper and the magazine were owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of WmLloydGarrison and heir to a railroad fortune.
Villard wrote “The Call” - a manifesto published on Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday that led to the founding of the NAACP. Villard was white, as were most of the luminaries that signed The Call and convened the conference from which NAACP grew. They envisioned an interracial organization fighting lynching and segregation.
White people had created the problem, Villard believed, and they should help fix it.
The conveners were sure they were doing a good thing, and they were people unused to being challenged. So they were startled when #IdaBWells and Monroe Trotter questioned them about their motives, their sincerity, and their desire to placate Booker T Washington.
For Ida’s willingness - as ever - to say the uncomfortable thing, disrupt the pleasant proceedings, demand accountability, she ended up on the outs. No one had done more to fight lynching, one of NAACP’s key issues, but Ida was only grudgingly added to the founders' roster.
From the very beginning, NAACP had detractors to its left and to its right, but it grew steadily from the two-room office in the Post building where DuBois worked, and Oswald Garrison Villard & Mary White Ovington fundraised. Take a look 👇#Suffrage100
Creator
Daily Suffragist
Source
Date
16/02/2020
Relation
Files
Collection
Citation
Daily Suffragist, “Founding of the NAACP,” Daily Suffragist, accessed September 9, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/383.