Mary White Ovington (1865-1951) was a civil rights reformer and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Mary White Ovington, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1865, was the daughter of wealthy parents who raised her in the tradition of those men and women who had worked for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Two of the family heroes were abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. In her youth Ovington was encouraged in the area of racial and civil rights reforms by her Unitarian minister, who was actively involved in social issues. At Radcliffe College Ovington was thoroughly tutored in the socialist school of thought and subsequently felt that racial problems were as much a matter of class as of race.

When she returned to New York in 1891 after her family suffered financial reverses, Ovington lived and worked at the Greenpoint...