DU BOIS, W.E.B. | Birth, February 23

W. E. B. Du Bois

February 23, 2021—This day in 1868 was born W.E.B Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He said he didn't really notice racial discrimination in his virtually all white town—only when people visited from out of town.

He studied at Fisk University in Nashville and then to Harvard, where he was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. 

He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and he became known as a  serious sociologist when he showed that poverty and crime in black communities resulted from racial barriers in education and employment. 

Du Bois under Taft

Republican President Taft found the legacy of Abraham Lincoln to be a burden in the south. He announced in his inaugural address that he would not appoint any Black men to federal jobs, reversing Theodore Roosevelt's policy of supporting Lincoln’s progressive stand in the south. Taft's "Southern Policy" supported whites' protests and he removed most Black office holders in the South.

In 1909, Booker T. Washington argued for training Blacks for industrial work, with only a few seeking higher education. He believed that in due course black people would rise socially and economically. DuBois argued against him, demanding more proactive steps toward equality. Black people in both the North and South began their drift toward the Democratic party that exploded with Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

Du Bois lived at 409 Edgecombe Ave. apartment building, which has a history dating back to the Harlem Renaissance, reported WNYC.  https://www.wnyc.org/story/visit-oldest-sidewalk-scaffold-new-york-city/. (The building has the oldest continuous sidewalk shed permit in the city, granted on April 27, 2006. The scaffolding went up to protect people from falling debris during a restoration project. But it stayed up after a lightning strike damaged that work and funds ran dry.)

The Founding of the NAACP

In 1905, Du Bois was a founder and general secretary of the Niagara Movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals. Du Bois founded and edited The Moon (1906) and The Horizon (1907-1910) as organs for the Niagara Movement.

In 1909, Du Bois was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The founding Treasurer was John E. Milholland, a newspaper publisher and editor whose elder daughter was Inez Milholland. Inez wrote a letter to Du Bois asking for space to write in his magazine and offering to serve as a "perpetual volunteer."  https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b162-i383

Du Bois identified as a socialist and belonged to the Socialist Party from 1910 to 1912.

The National Negro Committee was first located in John E. Milholland's Constitution League office at 500 Fifth Avenue. After Villard was persuaded to come aboard, the office was moved to space that he provided. The NAACP name was not established at the second annual meeting, on May 12, 1910. It expanded the Committee of Forty to 100, with a requirement that each of them give or raise $100. The Executive Committee was set at 30 members. The first Executive Committee created officers of the NAACP–with Walling as Chairman, Milholland as Treasurer and Villard as Disbursing Treasurer.

On June 28, 1910 six members attended an Executive Committee meeting. Milholland moved and Ovington seconded a motion to hire W. E. B. Du Bois as director of the Department of Publicity and research of the NAACP. Later in life, Du Bois remembers Ovington, Walling and Villard as the founders of the NAACP. But if Ovington was the engine that drove the creation of the NAACP, the fuel to run it was provided by Milholland. The multi-racial NAACP spelled the end of the Niagara Movement. Du Bois saw that an organization with some establishment (white) sponsors could generate more money to pay for staff, starting with himself. By the third and fourth meetings of the NAACP in Boston and Chicago in 1912, the NAACP was well established (Wedin, pp. 120-135).

Until May 18, 2008, the Wikipedia entry for the NAACP omitted Milholland from its description of the founders. The founding was scheduled for February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and this is considered the founding date of the NAACP although it actually took place in May. 

On May 8, 2008, the entry read: "On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, co-founder of the NAACP. 

At a second conference, on May 30, 1910, members formally called the organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected the first officers (as reported by Mary White Ovington): • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from NYC and Lewis, NY) • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois."

In 1910-34, DuBois edited the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. In it, he directed constant, often bitter, invective at white Americans while providing information to Blacks. The magazine published many young Black writers. Racial protest after World War I focused on securing anti-lynching legislation. During this period the NAACP was the leading protest organization and Du Bois its leading figure. The Crisis had more than 100,000 readers.

Milholland's Costly Support of the NAACP

Omitting Milholland's name is unfair because he contributed significantly to the NAACP and it proved to be a costly project for him when Woodrow Wilson became president. Milholland became wealthy because he obtained contracts with the Taft Administration for new pneumatic tubes to deliver mail within Manhattan. (There are 27 miles of these tubes or small tunnels under the roads of Manhattan.) 

With his new wealth, Milholland devoted himself to a Presbyterian religion-inspired vision of a world in which wealth was more equally distributed and civil rights were widely respected. He worked first with Booker T. Washington but became impatient with Washington's gradualism. Following critiques of Washington by Du Bois in 1900-01, Milholland shifted his financial resources away from Washington and toward Du Bois.

Milholland's religion-fired activism on behalf of Blacks contributed to a rapid decline in his fortunes. Milholland, a Republican, attacked as a racist Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster-General–the same man with control over lucrative contracts that were the basis for with the Batcheller Company's prosperity. His gifts to, and statements on behalf of, the cause of civil rights had an immediately negative impact on his business. He and his family paid dearly for his support of civil rights. Investors and taxpayers also paid dearly—investors saw the value of Milholland's company decline, while taxpayers did not benefit from the efficiencies that the Post Office had intended to bring to intra-urban mail delivery.

The 1904 edition of Polk's directory shows the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Company as a going concern with Milholland as President and B. C. Batcheller on the board. In 1905, the company had offices in New York City and Philadelphia as well as in London, Paris and Berlin. By the Poor's directory of 1917, John E. Milholland was replaced as President and was no longer on the Board.  Instead, Milholland was represented on the board by his son-in-law Eugen Boissevain (my mother's uncle).

Du Bois Resigns, 1934

Du Bois resigned after an ideological rift with the group. In 1935, he published Black Reconstruction, a Marxist interpretation of the post-Civil War era. At Atlanta University, where he later taught, he founded a review of race and culture called Phylon in 1940 and the same year published Dusk at Dawn, in which he examined his own career as a case study of race dynamics.

In 1934, Du Bois resigned from the NAACP board as well as from The Crisis because of his new advocacy of a Black nationalist strategy that ran in opposition to the NAACP’s commitment to integration. 

However, he returned to the NAACP as director of special research in 1944-1948. During this period, he was active in placing the grievances of Blacks before the United Nations, serving as a consultant to the UN founding convention in San Francisco in 1945 (my father was also there representing the U.S. Bureau of the Budget) and writing the famed “An Appeal to the World” published in 1947. He broke again with the NAACP permanently after a major disagreement. 

He joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he became a naturalized citizen at the age of 95. He died in Ghana in 1963, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington. Du Bois had two children with his wife, Nina Gomer. 

The NAACP is still going strong, fighting racism and bridging cultural divides. It was headed by Cornell Brooks for a while. A predecessor of Brooks as an officer of the NAACP was the late former Chairman Julian Bond.

Sources: Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998). Mary Ovington, Clare Coss

https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8826400924894495156/1340986641341498074 John E. Milholland https://inezmb.blogspot.com/2015/11/john-e-milhollands-role-in-founding-of.html https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-w-e-b-dubois/

 

BIRTH | W. E. B. DuBois, February 23,

W E B Dubois (1868-1963). Photo by
Carl Van Vechtem.

This day in 1868 was born scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, the first African-American to do so, with his dissertation on the slave trade, which Harvard published as the first in a series.

He continued his study of racism with his second book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), which popularized Du Bois’s idea of “the talented tenth,” the  one-out-of-ten probability that a black man will become a black leader.

In 1905, he  met with 30 other African-American scholars, artists, and activists in Ontario, Canada, near Niagara Falls, to discuss the challenges facing people of color. (Blacks were not allowed rooms at white-run U.S. hotels.)

From this first meeting came the formation in 1909 of the NAACP, which pursued the goal of integrating blacks into the American middle class. John E. Milholland, the Irish-born father of Inez Milholland, became a friend of Du Bois and was the first Treasurer of the NAACP. He provided space and other resources for the NAACP office. Like Inez Milholland for a time, Du Bois was a declared socialist in 1910-12. He served as director of publicity and research for the NAACP from 1910 to 1934.

The alternative vision for American blacks was led by Booker T. Washington, who believed in the idea of a separate path of achievement for blacks. With a gift from Andrew Carnegie, Washington built up what became Tuskegee University. Washington lived for a while in Fort Salonga, Long Island.

Du Bois died in Nkrumah's Ghana in 1963. Nkrumah called him "a phenomenon."

INEZ | Memorial March, January 20

Inez Milholland leads Woman Suffrage parade on Fifth
Avenue, New York City, May 1913, a month before
she met her husband-to-be, Eugen Boissevain.

If you live in upstate New York, please consider going to the second Adirondack Women’s March, planned for Saturday, January 20, 2018. 

The organizers promise that it will be a combination of "rally, march and community celebration," showing solidarity with women around the world. 

"We will stand together to protect the civil rights, safety, and health of all people. We call on defenders of human rights to join us at this peaceful, non-partisan event." It is free and is billed as non-partisan.

The event will begin at 11 a.m. at the grave of Inez Milholland at the top of the hill, in the Lewis Cemetery. The program will include a welcome address, poems, songs, and grave ceremony. Participants are encouraged to bring signs, flags, and/or flowers to lay on Inez’s gravesite. 

After the program, the march will proceed down the hill to the new Inez Milholland roadside marker, at the corner of Route 9 and Fox Run Road. It will continue up Route 9 to Lewis Veterans’ Park, and back past the Lewis Town Hall to the Lewis Congregational Church parsonage. 

At the parsonage, refreshments will include soup, bread and hot drinks. A program of sing-alongs, memories of 2017, and inspirational thoughts for the future is planned. The Town of Lewis will open its town hall from 11 a.m.to 2 p.m. so marchers can view the town exhibit about Inez and the Milholland family. 

Her father John E. Milholland amassed a fortune providing underground mail services via pneumatic tube, but he lost much of it when Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916, because of his Lincoln-Republican attacks on Wilson and his Postmaster-General, whom he accused of racism. He was the founding Treasurer of the NAACP.

There will also be two showings of “Forward Into Light,” the short film produced by Martha Wheelock about the life of Inez Milholland, at 10:30 a.m. and at 1 p.m. in the church parsonage. A Q&A, moderated by Kathy Linker and Sandra Weber, will follow each showing. 

Area Women’s March events are also planned for Glens Falls at noon and Plattsburgh at 3 pm. At a memorial for Inez in 1916, speakers praised her advocacy for feminism, for civil rights for blacks, and for humane treatment of inmates. "Inez hated inequality, shams and hypocrisy," says the announcement of the march. "She loved truth."

She also loved commitment. A century ago, the people of Lewis and Essex County decided to rename Mt Discovery, to call it Mt Inez. The maps were never changed. Isn't this change overdue?

A friend of the organizers said: “What Inez showed us was that it is possible to have a glorious time and stand like iron for truth.” The memorial march on January 20 is organized by Sandra Weber and David Hodges. For more information, visit the Women’s March website, adirondackwomen.weebly.com or email Sandra Weber at weber@sandraweber.com.

BLOG VIEWS | 30K–Top Posts in February 2017

Dank je wel.  (I am on Level 7 of Duolingo's free Dutch learning program. 😇 Never too late to figure out what my Dutch-born grandmother and mother were talking about 70 years ago.)

Thank you for reading!

This blog site was started in 2013 and has passed 30,000 page views.

Please post your comments or email your blogger at john@boissevainbooks.com.

Here are the most-read posts in February 2017:

INEZ | Fund-Raiser for Socialists, 1910-1922 Jan 19, 2017
RIP | Robert Lucas "Bob" Boissevain (1922-2017) Feb 18, 2017
MILLAY | One of Top 5 Authors in 1936 Jan 28, 2017
NWP | Katharine Hepburn Feb 3, 2017
INEZ | Washington March, 2013 – The Deltas Mar 5, 2013
INEZ | What would she do today? Write to th... Jan 23, 2017
AMSTERDAM | Herengracht + Keizersgracht (Updated O... Apr 11, 2016
INEZ | Led the 1913 Parade on Horseback Apr 20, 2013
MILHOLLAND | John E. and the NAACP Nov 10, 2015
MILHOLLAND | Men's Leagues for Woman Suffrage,... Jul 22, 2015

MILHOLLAND | John E. and the NAACP

Jean Milholland (L) and John E. Milholland (straw hat R),
in Holland in 1913 after Inez married Eugen Boissevain.

November 10, 2015–This post is inspired by the appointment of Cornell Brooks as President of the NAACP, the death on August 15 of former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, and the recent production of a play by Clare Coss on Mrs. Mary White Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is also inspired by a visit I made with Alice Tepper Marlin to the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore last Sunday.

There I picked up a well-documented biography of Ovington by Carolyn Wedin, entitled Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998).

At the time of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Booker T. Washington was the primary organizer of African Americans in the United States. He favored long-term projects like schools that allowed for gradualism in advocacy, a kind of Fabian advocacy of civil rights. For example, he was okay with the concept and goal of segregation, i.e., separate but equal communities, according to Wedin (p. 131).

W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociology professor at Atlanta University, was opposed to segregation and wanted faster movement toward civil rights for people of color. In 1903 he wrote a challenge to Washington in an essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" in his book Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement, an organization by and for black people, and would become the first employee of the NAACP.

My purpose here is to explore the role in this process of John E. Milholland, whose role is left out in some of the NAACP's own histories of its origins. John E. Milholland and Mary Ovington helped Du Bois create the NAACP (p. 95) as a successor to the Niagara Movement that included whites.

Milholland's status as an American was recent. He was born in upstate New York but his father, an Irish immigrant, was forced to return temporarily to Ireland after a fire. On their return, John E. was able to attend NYU thanks to the generosity of a Congressman who saw a young man of promise. John E. then became a reporter for, and subsequently editor of, the Ticonderoga paper. Following that, he came to New York City to write for an then edit the Tribune, which was a liberal Lincoln Republican newspaper that was headed for years by Horace Greeley, whose statues may be found near City Hall and in Greeley Square.

Milholland was a second-generation Scots-Irish Presbyterian who was in the first decade of the 20th century at the peak of his wealth. He was modestly prosperous when he worked at the Tribune and his  brother headed the printer's union. Between them they settled a strike and he may have been rewarded for that.

At any rate, Milholland soon after invested in a pneumatic tube company based on the expertise of B. C. Batcheller. He became President of the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Co. and became very wealthy based on Wall Street's ratcheting up in paper securities the value of his future prospects.

With his new wealth, Milholland was able to pursue his Presbyterian religion-inspired vision of a world in which wealth was more equally distributed and civil rights were widely respected. He worked first with Booker T. Washington but became impatient with Washington's gradualism. Following critiques of Washington by Du Bois in 1900-01, Milholland decided to shift his financial resources away from Washington and toward Du Bois.

There is a direct connection between Milholland's religion-fired activism on behalf of African-Americans and the rapid loss of his fortune. Milholland attacked for racism Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster-General–the same man with control over lucrative contracts that were the basis for with the Batcheller Company's prosperity. His gifts to, and statements on behalf of, the cause of civil rights had an immediately negative impact on his business. He and his family paid dearly for their support of civil rights and the NAACP.

The 1904 edition of Polk's directory shows the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Company as a going concern with Milholland as President and B. C. Batcheller on the board. In 1905, the company had offices in New York City and Philadelphia as well as in London, Paris and Berlin. By the Poor's directory of 1917, John E. Milholland was replaced as President and no longer on the Board.  Instead, his son-in-law Eugen Boissevain was on the board. 

Milholland's wealth acquired in the pneumatic tube business financed the expenses of Mary Ovington in working with the poor and disenfranchised blacks in New York City and states in the Deep South (Alabama and Georgia). Milholland's money was an important enabler for Ovington's work for the NAACP.

Milholland met Ovington in early January 1905 at a Sunday supper at Greenwich House in Manhattan. She conveyed to Milholland her interest in working on low-income housing and he offered to take her idea to Henry Phipps.  Phipps had just walked away with $2 billion (in 2015 dollars) from the creation of America’s largest corporation, Carnegie Steel, in 1901. Just as railways and railway-car manufacturers had been rolled up into giant companies in the prior two years, Carnegie Steel acquired J. P. Morgan's steel mills and thereby allowed the three largest shareholders in Carnegie Steel to cash out.

Two of those steel magnates are well known – Andrew Carnegie and his designated Chief Operating Officer Henry Clay Frick. The third one, Henry Phipps, was the less-known bookkeeper. Phipps had a social conscience because he had grown up in poverty in Pittsburgh. He was a strong supporter of  Teddy Roosevelt-era progressivism. From his new fortune Phipps took $1 million (equal to about $30 million today) and by 1906 began construction work on "improved tenements" to be located on the far east side of Manhattan at 31st Street. Several iterations of the Phipps Houses were eventually built – they would become the oldest and largest nonprofit affordable housing in New York City.

Ovington proposed that a settlement-house component be included in the first, Tuskegee Model Tenement. Although Henry Phipps was initially receptive to the idea, he backed away from it at the last minute – probably because in February 1908 he opted suddenly to side with Booker T. Washington's all-deliberate-speed approach to social change (Wedin, p. 93).

Unexpectedly without a patron for her work, Ovington went back to the man who had found Phipps for her, John E. Milholland. She became a regular visitor to Milholland at his office and his apartment at the Manhattan Hotel. She said she didn't get as much time with Booker Washington as Milholland did because she was "a woman of verity moderate means who, if she subscribed at all to his school, would not be able to get beyond the ten dollar bill" (Wedin, p. 67).

Ovington visited the Adirondacks for several weeks in July and September 1905. Her biographer believes she visited Milholland at that time and supports the idea that Milholland was having an affair over several months and that it was with her (Wedin, p. 67).

Besides the Phipps tenement, Milholland and Ovington worked on the Constitution League, which was a forerunner of the NAACP. The first offices of the NAACP were at the offices of the Constitution League, at 500 Fifth Avenue – at 42nd Street overlooking the New York Public Library – in Manhattan.

Milholland's activities in support of Du Bois were not unnoticed by Booker Washington. According to Du Bois' biographer, Washington threatened to use his contacts with the U.S. Post Office to terminate the Batcheller Company's large contracts for delivering mail by pneumatic tube (Wedin, p. 70), and his threat became a reality in 1916 at the time of Wilson's reelection.

In 1905-06, Ovington was the link between Du Bois' Niagara Movement and Milholland's Constitution League. Her work in this arena would pay off when she started working for Du Bois and then assembled lists for the "Call" to create the NAACP in 1909.

First, Ovington brought Oswald Garrison Villard into the Du Bois camp, with several articles in the New York Evening Post, which he owned, reporting first on Du Bois' Niagara Movement meetings  at Harper's Ferry in mid-summer of 1906 and then in August on Washington's Negro Business League in Atlanta with a subtly inserted Du Bois perspective (Wedin, pp. 74-76).

A month after the Negro Business League meeting in Atlanta, the worst race riots of the decade occurred in this city. The Du Bois followers saw this as a failure of Washington's League. Milholland promised to pay Ovington's expenses to report on the riots and poverty in Georgia and Alabama and  Du Bois supported Ovington in this project.

Ovington reported from the south until March 1907. Conditions, she said, were much worse in Atlanta than had appeared in the newspapers. No white man had gone to jail for killing a Negro. Whites freely purchased firearms whereas "colored fathers, in their homes, were forced by the militia to give up their means of defense" (Wedin, p. 80).

The year 1908 was a difficult one for Mary Ovington because as mentioned the commitment that she believed Henry Phipps had made to her was suddenly withdrawn. A crystallizing moment for her was an article by a white journalist, William English Walling, "Race War in the North," in the Independent of September 1908. Walling was the first person to throw down the gauntlet to all Americans, to fulfill the promise of Abraham Lincoln. As Ovington wrote at the time:

Here was the first person who had sent a challenge to white and colored to battle, as the abolitionists had battled, for the full rights of the Negro. Drums beat in my heart. (Wedin, p. 106).

She immediately sent a letter to Walling, but several months went by and he did not answer. After she heard him speak in New York City, she went up to him and proposed that they create a new organization. She followed up with a second letter, and this time Walling answered, suggesting they meet with Charles Edward Russell. In January 1909 she arrived at Walling's apartment. Russell did not show up, but sent Henry Moskowitz in his place.

At that meeting, the NAACP was created. They drafted a "Call" for a meeting, to be issued on Lincoln's 100th birthday. The only one of the original three who was able to make the "Call" an interracial one was Ovington, based on her many contacts during the period when she was traveling around with the support of Milholland. The signers of the Call – 53 people in Ovington's version, 60 in Villard's – did not all know one another, but they all knew Ovington (Wedin, p. 106).

An invited interracial organizing meeting of 300 people met in the Charity Organization building. An informer for Booker Washington reported that those present included: "Du Bois, Waldron, Walters, [Upton] Sinclair, Max, Barber, Wibecan, Dr. Moselle, Bulkeley, [John E.] Milholland, Ida Wells..." A public meeting at Cooper Union attracted 1,500 people. The resolutions "sounded much like those of Milholland's Constitution League and Du Bois' Niagara Movement". Ovington was distressed that the platform was "denounced by nearly every white man", while "a large number of colored people thought it unwise". A Committee of Forty was created to pursue the organization of the NAACP. (Wedin, pp. 110-111).

The Wikipedia entry on the NAACP once said that it was founded by black men and Jewish men, which based on Wedin's account would eliminated any recognition for the huge role of gentiles and women, including Milholland and Ovington. The historical record that Wikipedia keeps for each entry should show that I corrected the statement on May 18, 2008. Here is what I wrote on the Boissevain.us web site that I was then contributing to.

5/18/08 John E. Milholland Added to NAACP Entry in Wikipedia as First Treasurer. Until today, the Wikipedia entry for the NAACP omitted Milholland from its description of the founders. The founding was scheduled for February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and this is considered the founding date of the NAACP although it actually took place in May. The entry reads as of today: "On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, co-founder of the NAACP. At a second conference, on May 30, 1910, members formally called the organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected the first officers (as reported by Mary White Ovington): • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from NYC and Lewis, NY) • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois."

As mentioned, the National Negro Committee was first located in John E. Milholland's Constitution League office at 500 Fifth Avenue. After Villard was persuaded to come aboard, the office was moved to space that he provided. The NAACP name was not established at the second annual meeting, on May 12, 1910. It expanded the Committee of Forty to 100, with a requirement that each of them give or raise $100. The Executive Committee was set at 30 members. The first Executive Committee created officers of the NAACP – Walling was Chairman, Milholland was Treasurer and Villard was Disbursing Treasurer.

On June 28, 1910 six members attended an Executive Committee meeting. Milholland moved and Ovington seconded a motion to hire W. E. B. Dubois as director of the Department of Publicity and research of the NAACP. Later in life, Dubois remembers Ovington, Walling and Villard as the founders of the NAACP. But if Ovington was the engine that drove the creation of the NAACP, the fuel to run it was provided by Milholland. The NAACP spelled the end of the Niagara Movement, because Du Bois saw quickly that an organization with establishment sponsors could generate more money to pay for staff, starting with himself. By the third and fourth meetings of the NAACP in Boston and Chicago in 1912, the NAACP was well established (Wedin, pp. 120-135).

Sources

Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998).

Related Posts

Inez Milholland—Herald Uniform 1913 . Her Engagement to Marconi . Short Biopic on Her

NAACP | 5C. Former Chair Julian Bond Dies at 75 (2)

Julian Bond (1940-2105)

Julian Bond died on August 15 in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. at 75. He chaired the NAACP, whose founding Treasurer was Inez Milholland's father, John E. Milholland.

John E. Milholland had an affair with Mary Ovington, a fellow member of the NAACP board. It is referenced twice in the new play by Clare Coss, Dr. Du Bois and Mrs. Ovington.

In the long NY Times obituary of Julian Bond, his great-grandmother is described as a "slave mistress". The Times' Public Editor reports that several people have objected to the phrase, which the Times has used before.

Even though Bond himself has described his ancestor as a "mistress", to those who object to it the word connotes consensuality that is lacking in a master-slave relationship. The Times will seek to avoid the word in future in describing such a relationship.

Bond was born Horace Julian Bond. His father was Horace Mann Bond, who became president of Lincoln College. His mother was a librarian. Julian Bond was at Morehouse College when he became one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Later, he became a founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives (four terms) and Georgia State Senate (six terms), a total of 20 years.

Julian Bond 1940-2015

by Alice Walker (The Color Purple)

Julian / The first time I sang / We Shall Overcome
Was in a circle / On the lawn of Trevor Arnett Library / At Atlanta University
And by chance / I was holding / Your hand.
We were all so young, / Julian,
And so hopeful / In our solidarity.
I stumbled over some of the words / In the new to me / Song
But you sang solemnly, / Correctly, / Devoutly,
Believing every word
You sang / With your whole / Handsome / Heart.
A friend writes / That you will be buried
At sea / And I nod
Because that is how it felt / Those years so long ago;
That we were so young, / Vulnerable,
Swimming against / An awesome tide of hatred
And despair / Definitely / At sea.
But we persevered / As so many waves
Mountains of tears / Came roaring towards, and over, us.
Martin, Jack, Bobby, / Fannie Lou
Who never said what else / They did to her / After they beat her
Body into a leathery / Stiffness / After arresting her in / That small town jail.
Julian, / The guns, / The drugs, / The miseducation,
Also aimed at all we loved.
And us somehow / You somehow / Managing to keep / Standing.
You were so young / In those days
Of tight jeans / And a young wife / “the other Alice” / I thought of her.
She who would save / Your life / When we thought you’d / Lost it.
They are saying many things / About you now
So much praise / That is well earned.
And yet, / I wonder if they can / Imagine / The young man you were
Standing in / That Circle of Life / So long ago / Holding hands
With those as fragile, / As determined, / As pure as you / Waiting for the future
We would make / With just our circle / And our song.

© 2015 Alice Walker
http://alicewalkersgarden.com/2015/08/julian-bond-1940-2015/

MILHOLLAND | 5C. Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington [5]

The characters of Mary Ovington (L) and Dr. W.
E. B. Du Bois, in the February production of a new
 play by Clare Coss.

At a recent fundraiser for Carolyn Maloney and Rebecca Seawright at the home of Mitch Draizin in Sag Harbor, I spoke with Clare Coss, a playwright who in February had her new play "Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington" produced at the Castillo Theater in New York.

I was unable to attend her play because I was in Europe visiting relatives.

When I spoke with Clare Coss I reminded her that I had written a play about Inez Milholland that was produced as a staged reading in her birthplace, Lewis, N.Y. as well as at City Hall and the Springs Presbyterian Church.

We had talked about Inez's father, John E. Milholland, who was one of the founding Board members of the NAACP – he was the founding Treasurer.

He had gotten to know Mary Ovington from his board work with the NAACP and the two of them had an affair – from all that I have read, her only affair and possibly his as well.

Clare told me that there is a reference in her play to the affair with John Milholland. She sent me a copy of her play and I have verified that he is in it!

MILHOLLAND | Sept. 26–John, Sr., Dies, 1895

John Milholland (1819-1895)

John Milholland, father of John E. Milholland and grandfather of Inez Milholland, died in Paterson, N.J. on September 26, 1895.

I have some papers relating to his investment in electricity generation in Essex County, N.Y. but not much is known about him except what his son John E. Milholland wrote about him in his diaries.

Here is the one-paragraph obit in the New York Times, Friday, September 27, 1895, p. 8.

John E. Milholland’s Father Dead  Paterson, N.J., September 26. - John Milholland, 77 years old, father of John E. Milholland of New-York, died here to-day. He was a widower. He was born in the north of Ireland, and came to America when young. He was for many years a farmer. Since 1870 he has made his home with his daughter, Mrs. B. J. Worden of this city. He leaves five children.

John E. Milholland (1860-1925) grave.

***

At the time of his father's death in 1895, John E. Milholland (1860-1925) was riding high. In 1894 his anti-Platt organization in New York City was strong. He disbanded it in 1895. He was a  newspaper editor, labor negotiator, and developer of tubes for mail delivery.

John E. Milholland was born in 1860 on the "Meadowmount" property in Lewis, NY. After a fire that killed his mother and a sister, John Milholland took his son back to Derry in Ireland. John E. Milholland writes of the fire in his diary with great emotion.

The Milhollands returned to the United States. John E. Milholland attracted the interest of a local Congressman in New York City, who arranged for his tuition to be paid. Milholland became editor of the Ticonderoga paper and then the NY Tribune. At the Tribune, John E. became famous for settling the printers' strike with the help of his brother, who was the shop steward of the printing plant.

He organized the Pneumatic Tube Company which built the underground mail tube system in NY. His daughter Inez had a big dispute with him over some ethical issue in the handling of his business affairs. He sold the NY system to the Boston Company. He then built the system for Philadelphia and got a ten-year contract to carry U.S. Mail. He used the money to improve his Meadowmount estate.

He was also one of the last of the Lincoln Republicans, certainly in New York State by the time he died. In 1905, he wrote a book called The Negro and the Nation. It is extensively sourced by Shawn Leigh Alexander in his book An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP.  John E. fought the Republican Platt Machine in New York City. As a Scotch-Irish American, he was a staunch Presbyterian.

Milholland took out a one-year lease at 500 Fifth Avenue for the Constitution League, which he founded and had racial injustices at the top of its agenda, including (on its letterhead) over-incarceration, especially racial minorities.

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of his partners in this cause and was involved with the Constitution League in 1906 when it took on a military case. Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights advocate, representing the League, met with Secretary of War William Howard Taft to discuss the Brownsville affair. She asked Taft to suspend the soldiers’ dismissal and to rehear of the case. Meanwhile the League did its own research and succeeded in getting Senate hearings. These interventions resulted in reinstatement of only 14 soldiers out of 167. Sergeant Saunders, 1st sergeant of Company B, 25th Infantry and the recipient of an extant letter dated December 8, 1906 from Terrell with her papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division (ID #na011), remained dismissed after 25 years' service, less than two years short of retirement with a pension. In 1972 the army conducted a new investigation and the order of 1906 was reversed but there was only one survivor, Dorsie Willis, who received some compensation.

Milholland was the first Treasurer of the NAACP when it was formed in 1909, perhaps the only WASP member of the founding board. The formation of the NAACP followed the race riots in Springfield, Mass. in 1908. The President was Moorfield Storey of Boston; the Chairman of the Executive Committee was William English Walling; Treasurer was John E. Milholland; Disbursing Treasurer was Oswald Garrison Villard; Executive Secretary was Frances Blascoer; Director of Publicity and Research was Dr. W. E. B. DuBois (the only African American on the Board).

On May 18, I corrected the Wikipedia entry on the NAACP because it omitted the name of John E. Milholland from among the founders. The following is posted on the boissevain.us website:

5/18/08 John E. Milholland Added to NAACP Entry in Wikipedia as First Treasurer. Until today, the Wikipedia entry for NAACP omitted Milholland from its description of the founders. The founding was scheduled for February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and this is considered the founding date of the NAACP although it actually took place in May. The entry reads as of today: "On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, co-founder of the NAACP. At a second conference, on May 30, 1910, members formally called the organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected the first officers (as reported by Mary White Ovington): • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (a Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from New York City and Lewis, NY) • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois." http://www.naacp.org/about/history/howbegan/index.htm

True to his beliefs, Milholland challenged Wilson's postmaster-general on race issues. He paid a big price. Wilson was reelected in 1916, despite the best efforts of his daughters Inez (who gave her life in the effort) and Vida. John E. Milholland lost both his daughter and his company's contract with the U.S. Post Office.

After 1916, he seems to have taken a big step backward in his ability to finance projects, although his letters continue to show his effort to be generous to the causes he believes in. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote asking for $1,000 for a trip to Europe and John E. Milholland wrote back that this amount was his total giving to the Constitution League.

In his later years he was "land poor" - he had a large property in Essex County but not enough money to maintain the lifestyle he had intended for it. Inez's sister Vida writes that she regrets having squandered her jewelry on travel expenses to accompany Inez in 1916.

In August 1924 he had a Swan Song, as he again complained about the lack of diversity in the "Forward into Light" Pageant that was held on his property.

He died a year later. The Oubliette Library includes a note in the W. E. B. Du Bois Collection from Mrs. Milholland to Du Bois thanking him for his sympathy note. Mrs. Milholland wrote, after John E. died, that his main legacy was the huge Meadowmount property; the bonds were largely worthless. She went about selling off pieces of the property to raise money.  Calvin Tomkins of the New Yorker (soon to be 90 years old, and still writing!), who grew up near the Milhollands, told me he purchased a small piece of the property and sold it decades later.

See also: John E. Milholland and the Platt Machine in New York

ASHOKA | Morgan Dixon and National GirlTrek

Trekking for Health - Morgan Dixon 

At the Ashoka Support Network dinner yesterday, I spoke with Morgan Dixon, the newest of the Ashoka Fellows. She has a compelling story, and a plan for a national GirlTrek event on October 16.

I see a lot of similarities between Morgan and her predecessor activist 100 years ago, Inez Milholland:

• Morgan is smart. She says she was the first in her class to graduate from college. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Southern California and then went on to get a Master of Education Policy and Leadership at Seton Hall. 
• Morgan is a street organizer. Inspired by her sister and other members of her family. She says she is also inspired by Ella Baker and Septima Poinsette Clark, both of whom worked on civil rights issues with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.
• Morgan is a leader. She founded GirlTrek with her sister in Teaneck, N.J., and previously served as director of leadership development for one of the largest charter school networks in the country, Achievement First. Before Achievement First, Morgan directed the development and start-up of six public schools in NYC for St. Hope and the Urban Assembly, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 
• Morgan is a communicator. She began her career with Teach For America as a high school history teacher in Atlanta, GA, and later as a school administrator in Newark, NJ. Morgan was awarded Teach For America's 2012 Social Innovation Award.  
• She is a popular speaker. She was recognized by the Awesome Foundation as a leader to watch. She recently addressed students at Yale and Princeton and opened the 2012 summit for the National Outdoor Leadership School.

She told me that she started GirlTrek two years ago because she was heartbroken that so many black women die of preventable diseases. She says that four out of five African American women are overweight and half of them are obese. Yet 70 percent of them are the breadwinners in the family. (I haven't checked any of these numbers, but they sound right.)

Morgan is trying to draw attention to the need for a change in diet and need for exercise through walks for black women's health. GirlTrek supports African American women and girls' living healthier lives by walking.

 GirlTrek, based in Washington, D.C. supports more than 15,000 walkers and is operated with the help of 300 volunteers and 145,000 supporters. GirlTrek aims to mobilize one million supporters to lead a "walking revolution for better health" in high-need communities across America. GirlTrek's health movement relies on telling stories, providing active role models, organizing in the street, partnering with other organizations and just making the case to the media.

Morgan will keep them all moving by example and exhortation.

Comment

Morgan exemplifies the front edge of the woman's movement that dates itself back to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, and got itself renewed energy in the 1913 march sponsored by the National Woman's Party in Washington, which Inez Milholland led on horseback.

I was at the centennial march last year and have already commented that it was composed 95 percent of Deltas,  from all over the country. The Delta Sigma Theta sorority had just been founded at Howard University in 1913 is the activist sorority that Inez championed to be part of the Washington march.

INEZ | Washington March, 2013 – The Deltas

March 3, 1913–Suffragist Parade. It was a Monday, the day
before President Wilson's first inauguration. Photo: Library of Congress.

I am back home in New York City from the centennial of the famed suffrage march in 1913, on the eve of the President Wilson's swearing-in.

It was on Monday, March 3, 1913.

The 1913 and 2013 parades were very different...

In 1913, It Became a Riot. Back then, the parade of women was huge for the time. The NY Times said 5,000 marchers; the National Park Service reported 8,000. It was the first major public demonstration in Washington. The 500,000 onlookers, mostly men, jeered the women as they went by. The parade devolved into a riot.

New Yorker Inez Milholland was on horseback at the front, and she pushed the edge of the crowd back with her horse. But behind her, push came to shove and the DC police couldn't keep order - some believe they didn't try. Secretary of War Stimson ordered cavalry in from Fort Myer to calm things down, but by the time the military arrived hundreds of women were injured. The marchers were protected by the First Amendment, but not by the police. The police superintendent was later cross-examined by Congress and was relieved of his job.

On March 2, 2013, a National Park Service Ranger tells
how the National Woman's Party met in 2017 with Pres.
Wilson to ask for support of Votes for Women, in the
name of Inez Milholland Boissevain, who died in Nov.
1916. Wilson ridiculed the women. Photo by JT Marlin. 

Back Story: Black Sorority Excluded. During the weeks before the parade, the participation of  black women in general was a thorny issue for Alice Paul. Later in life, she described this issue as her main preoccupation at the time.

To be specific, a new breakaway sorority at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta, demanded that it have a place in the parade. The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority's leadership at Howard University had decided to break away from the socially ambitious club to form a new sorority that would be more socially activist.

These 22 Delta women wanted to march in the NAWSA parade. Alice Paul feared that participation by black women in still-segregated Washington would end the participation in the parade of the southern chapters of NAWSA and destroy NAWSA's unity.

Alice Paul was in charge of the "Congressional Committee" of NAWSA in 1912 after working for the British suffragettes. She started recruiting new people and raising money, much of it in New York City where NAWSA was then based. She tried to hold together the fragile coalition for a Federal Amendment for Votes for Women.

Inez Milholland disagreed on excluding the black sorority. She was the daughter of the first Treasurer of the NAACP, John E. Milholland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian who clung to the Lincoln Republican ethos of supporting equality among the races. She was adamant that the Deltas should be given their place, and allowed to march, in the parade lineup. She threatened to withdraw her commitment to lead the Washington parade on horseback. She had led the New York suffrage parade on horseback to great applause in New York City – it was a media attraction. She was also well connected with NAWSA supporters like Alva Belmont in New York City.

Alice Paul grudgingly agreed to allow the Howard University Deltas to join the parade. But she also had a plan, which appears not to have been shared with Inez Milholland, to minimize the danger to the parade by putting all the black women at the end of the parade, after the Men's League for Woman Suffrage.

It may be hard for some to appreciate how low the status of black women was in the Washington 100 years ago – or how threatened some white people were by signs of electoral activism. The outcome of the Civil War was to enfranchise black men. But the federal law was undermined by Jim Crow laws passed in southern states designed to suppress the black vote as well as the votes of some less-educated white men. For advocates of Votes for Women, seeing black women marching in a parade would remind southerners that adding women voters would double the number of potential black voters.

Contemporary accounts say that Alice Paul and the Congressional Committee leadership were  worried that a visible black presence in the parade would set back progress toward a federal amendment. They may have foreseen that including black women in the parade would add to the potential for the violent reaction that actually occurred. Suffragist Mary Church Terrell reported that the Delta marchers were required to assemble in a segregated area. It was her opinion that:

If [Paul] and other white suffragist leaders could get the Anthony Amendment through without enfranchising African American women, they would do so.

Linda Lumsden's biography of Inez Milholland makes clear that however much Inez may have gone along with excluding blacks in other social contexts, she was firm about the participation of the Deltas.  Milholland was, like her father, a member of the NAACP. Citing Mary Church Terrell again, Lumsden says that Milholland insisted that the Howard contingent be allowed to march in the college section. Emmett Scott, secretary-treasurer of Howard University, said that Milholland

was unwilling to participate in a parade symbolizing a movement which was not big enough or broad enough to live up to the principles for which it was contending. (Lumsden, Inez, p. 91.)

On the day of the parade, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a former slave who had become a leading suffragist, defied the ruling of the Congressional Committee and marched with her Chicago NAWSA delegation. Others followed suit. In the end, 22 women marched in the Delta contingent and an unknown number of black NAWSA delegates marched with their geographical groups. But the only black organization to march as a group in the parade was the Howard delegation of Deltas! If 250 black women altogether were in the march – probably too high an estimate – and we use the lower NY Times estimate of the number of marchers, it means black marchers were at most 5 percent of the total.

The Deltas listen to their leaders talk about the Deltas' mission,
 "public service" and "social activism." Photo by JT Marlin.

The 2013 March Reversed the Racial Balance. The March 3, 2013 march was a totally different affair. This time, the newly born, tiny Deltas were now the main organizer of the event. They have grown into an army of 300,000 black women world-wide.

For the 100th anniversary march, Delta Sigma Theta reported 20,000 marchers signed up to be in Washington for the parade. The National Park Service posted a crowd estimate of 20,000-25,000.

My estimate is that fewer than 1,000 of the marchers were white men and women. The racial percentages were therefore exactly reversed. In 1913, at most 5 percent of the marchers were black. In 2013, at most 5 percent were white.

Looking Forward, Not Back. Another major difference in 2013 is in the nature of the participation of the Deltas and the other women's groups.

• The traditional women's groups, mostly white women, were commemorating the actions of the suffragists to obtain the vote. They dressed up in the costumes of 1913 with purple, gold and white sashes and dresses. Although the picketing of the White House did not start until January 1917, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial group had an effective tableau in place on March 2, 2013 showing the Silent Sentinels in front of the White House. When the demonstrators were arrested by the DC Police, Inez Milholland's sister Vida was one of those arrested, on July 4, 1917. They were taken away to the Occaquam workhouse in Lorton, Va., as described by a National Park Service Ranger who gave the history of woman suffrage in the United States while engaging the audience in some effective role playing (see second photo above).
• For the Deltas, the parade was less about history and pageantry and more about the next phase of the women's movement. Those Deltas marched with a purpose, every one of them dressed in their red and white colors, and the speeches in front of the Capitol (see bottom photo) were about moving on to new challenges, using their vote to attack continuing abuse of women in the home or in the workplace.

Meaning of the 2013 Parade. The 2013 Centennial parade was scheduled to start at 9:30 am on Sunday but by the time the Deltas who had assembled at the foot of the Capitol were emptied out and other groups started to march it was 10:45 am. The women's groups were there, some in suffragist costume. The traditional women's groups were relatively few in number, several dozen each at most from the League of Women Voters (successor to NAWSA), the National Woman's Party/Sewall-Belmont House and Museum (successor to the breakaway Congressional Committee of NAWSA), the National Organization of Women, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Committee and ERA of New Jersey.

There was no rioting – far from it! It was an eerily quiet Sunday morning. The Deltas are all business. They didn't bring any marching bands, which explains why the crowds were thin. Since Washington, DC workers now mostly live in suburban Maryland and Virginia, there were few onlookers, maybe 5,000 at most. Protest marches in Washington are now a regular occurrence. The Deltas were in D.C. in January and will be back in a couple of months.

Inez Milholland's insistence that the Deltas be allowed to march took on more significance for me as I watched an hour-long parade of the sorority's many chapters go by. Inez knew which way the winds were blowing. For the Deltas in 2013:

• The purpose of most of the marchers, and the meaning of the event, was not so much a memorial to the achievements of yesterday.
• Rather, it was a reaffirmation of what the original marchers believed in. Progress has been achieved – that is obvious – since the first parade. But the Deltas marched not so much out of reverence for the past as out of determination to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

[I have written a longer post putting the two marches in a more complete historical context. I have long been fascinated by the story because Inez Milholland married my mother's uncle, Eugen Boissevain.]