Black and White SAT Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to abolitionist parents, Ovington (1865-1951), a white socialist, reporter and pioneering settlement-house worker, in 1909 became a principal cofounder, with black civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Originally published in the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper in the early '30s, this informal, modest reminiscence only touches on Ovington's pivotal role in welding together influential blacks and whites to launch the NAACP, which she chaired from 1919 to 1947. Yet the book provides a vivid picture of the NAACP's campaign against lynchings, judicial outrages, discrimination and prejudice. Ovington presents valuable firsthand close-ups of Du Bois and his rival, Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist approach she rejected in favor of Du Bois's demands for full equality. She also makes interesting observations about black theater, fiction and poetry in the interwar years. Luker co-edited The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (June)