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THE CRISIS NOVEMBER 1928 [[image: front cover of The Crisis November 1928, featuring headshot of young woman in embroidered white cotton top, with text: 'THE CRISIS NOVEMBER' at top and '15ยข. The Copy 1928 $1.50 The Year]] [[image: head and shoulders of man with moustache and short beard]] [[caption]] W.E.B. DUBOIS W.E.B. Dubois, scholar from Atlanta University, was one of the founders of the NAACP who answered Mrs. Overton's call. Dr. Dubois was the editor of the Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP.[[/caption]] W.E.B. Dubois, founder of the Niagara Movement and brilliant leader of the "Talented Tenth," came up from the Deep South where he was occupying the chair of economics at Atlanta University. Down from Boston came William Monroe Trotter, the highly articulate, militant and impatient editor of The Guardian. Also from Boston came Moorfield Storey who had been secretary to Charles Sumner and was to become the fist president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Midwest was represented by such feminine stalwarts as Jane Addams, Ida Wells Barnett and Celia Parker Woolley of Chicago, and by Charles P. Thwing and W. S. Scarborough, presidents, respectively, of Western Reserve and Wilberforce universities in Ohio. John Dewey, who was beginning his great career at Columbia University, was there. Also Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Rev. E. Moore, Charles Edward Russell, Mary Church Terrell, Bishop Alexander Walters, Albert E. Pillsbury, J.E. Spingarn, R.R. Wright, Archibald H. Grimke, Mary McClean, Leonora O'Reilly, William A. Sinclair, John E. Milholland, Lillian D. Wald, Frances Blascoer, who became the NAACP's first executive secretary and Rev. C. E. Stowe, the son of Harriet Beecher Stowe. William Hayes Ward, editor of The Independent, presided at the opening session. There were scholarly papers by such authorities as Livingston Farrand, professor of anthropology at Columbia University; Burt G. Wilder, neurologist of Cornell University; Edwin R.A. Seligman, professor of political economy at Columbia, Professor Dewey; and Dr. DuBois. Miss Ovington, of course, and her co-sponsors, Moskowitz, Villard and Walling, were active participants in the conference along with many others. All in all, it was a distinguished gathering of educators, scholars, clergymen, social workers, publicists and philanthropists. There was an encouraging letter from William Lloyd Garrison, son of the Boston Abolitionist, and others from Brand Whitlock, the great liberal mayor of Toledo, Ohio; David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford University in California; and Edward Everett Hale, author and clergyman, who commended to the attention of the conferees Lord Byron's challenging lines: Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought. Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No! Garrison, in his message, expressed the hope "that the conference will utter no uncertain sound on any point affecting the vital subject. No part of it is too delicate for plain speech. The republican experiment is at stake, every tolerated wrong to the Negro reacting with double force upon white citizens guilty of faithlessness to their brothers. The rampant antipathy to the Oriental races is part and parcel of the domestic question. Safety lies in an absolute refusal to differentiate the rights of human beings." The Call to Action Such was the climate in the nation when, on the centennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, February 12, 1909, a group of 60 white and Negro clergymen, social workers, publicists, educators and philanthropists called upon "all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty." The call, written by Oswald Garrison Villard, then publisher of The New York Evening Post and of The Nation, originated in the mind of Mary White Ovington, a New York social worker, who had been horrified by a bloody race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of 1908. She acted in response to the challenge of William English Walling, a Southern-born journalist, who had concluded an article on the riot in The Independent Magazine with this query: "Yet who realizes the seriousness of the situation, and what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their [the Negroes'] aid?" Miss Ovington was ready. She enlisted the aid of Dr. Henry Moskowitz, a social worker among immigrants in New York City who later became influential in Democratic politics in the city and state. Also she secured the assistance of Mr. Walling and later of Mr. Villard who chrished his Abolitionist heritage as a grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the uncompromising founder and editor of The Liberator, the most famous of the anti-slavery journals. Mr. Walling and Dr. Moskowitz met with Miss Ovington in her New York apartment during the first week of 1909. Later she was to write: "It was then that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born." The call, which was issued on Lincoln's birthday, observed that the celebration of the centennial "will fail to justify itself if it takes no note of and makes no recognition of the colored men and women for whom the Great Emancipator labored to assure freedom." DR. W.E.B. DUBOIS, c. 1920/BROWN BROS. (INSET) THE CRISIS MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 1928
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