Mary white ovington biography of michaels

Mary White Ovington was deeply involved in two of the most important movements of the 20th century: civil rights and women's suffrage.

Joining the civil rights cause

Ovington was born in 1865 in Brooklyn to parents who supported women's rights and the abolition of slavery.

As a young woman, Ovington decided to join the civil rights movement after hearing Frederick Douglass speak at a Brooklyn church.

Ovington helped to establish the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn and a few years later Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations in 1904.

There, she spent the next five years studying the employment and housing problems of Manhattan's Black community.

Ovington threw herself fully into the cause of civil rights for Black Americans after reading an article in 1908 that described a race riot that led to seven deaths and mass destruction in Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois.

The author, William English Walling, ended the article with a r