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 | Feb. 23–W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP's Founding

W. E. B. Du Bois

This day in 1868 was born civil rights activist and professor W[illiam] E[dward] B[urghardt] Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Mass., where he went to school with mostly white children.

The Life of Du Bois

He was elected valedictorian of his high school and the enlightened townspeople raised the money to give him a scholarship to Fisk University in Tennessee.

At Fisk Du Bois first encountered institutional racism. Jim Crow laws meant that blacks were required to use separate drinking fountains, restaurants, restrooms, banks and schools.

He went on to graduate school and eventually became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. His thesis on the U.S. slave trade was published. After graduation, however, he was unable to get a job at a major university.

He taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio, then spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania, where in 1899 he wrote his first major book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, the first sociological case study of a black community, which popularized Du Bois's phrase "the talented tenth," referring to the likelihood of one in ten black men becoming leaders of their people.

Du Bois made his name nationally with the publication in 1903 of his book The Souls of Black Folks, a collection of essays that explored the thesis that the “central problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” (In retrospect, there were other problems of equivalent importance, unless one broadens the definition of the color line to include Nazi protocols.) One controversial essay, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," attacked Washington, who founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Tuskegee trained blacks in agricultural and industrial skills; DuBois objected that Washington was selling out blacks by advocating silence in civil rights issues in return for vocational training opportunities.

In 1905, Du Bois met with 30 other African-American activists in Canada, near Niagara Falls, to discuss the challenges that people of color faced. They had to meet in Canada because blacks were not allowed rooms at white-run U.S. hotels.

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

Last year my wife Alice Tepper Marlin and I visited  the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore. There I picked up a well-documented biography of Mary White Ovington by Carolyn Wedin, entitled Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998).

Its theme squares with that of  a play by Clare Coss on Mrs. Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois, namely the importance of Ovington to Du Bois and the importance of Inez Milholland's father John E. Milholland to Ovington's work.

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).

Du Bois, by this time a sociology professor at Atlanta University, was opposed to segregation and wanted faster movement toward civil rights for people of color.  Du Bois would become the first employee of the NAACP.

Milholland and Ovington as Allies of Du Bois

The key role in this process of John E. Milholland is left out in some of the NAACP's own histories. John E. Milholland and Mary Ovington helped Du Bois create the NAACP (p. 95) as a successor to the Niagara Movement.

Milholland 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, N.Y. newspaper. Following that, he came to New York City to write for and then edit the Tribune, which was a liberal Lincoln Republican newspaper edited at that time by Horace Greeley. Statues of Greeley may be found near City Hall and in Greeley Square.

Milholland 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. But he became extremely prosperous, on paper at least, after investing in a pneumatic tube company based on the expertise of B. C. Batcheller. He became President of the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Co. and Wall Street ratcheted up in the value of its shares.

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 shifted his financial resources away from Washington and toward Du Bois.

Milholland's religion-fired activism on behalf of African-Americans contributed to a rapid decline in his fortunes. Milholland 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 their support of civil rights.

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, he was replaced on the board by his son-in-law Eugen Boissevain (my mother's uncle).

Milholland's decade of 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 several 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 very moderate means" (Wedin, p. 67).

Ovington visited the Adirondacks for several weeks in July and September 1905. Her biographer believes she visited John E. 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). I have read John Milholland's diary from that period and he castigates himself for his infidelity.

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. The building now houses the North American office of Oxford University.

Milholland's activities in support of Du Bois were not unnoticed by Booker Washington. According to Du Bois's 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's Niagara Movement and Milholland's Constitution League. Her many labors in this vineyard yielded fruit for Du Bois when she started working for him and 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. She reported, with a subtly introduced Du Bois perspective, on:

• First, Du Bois's Niagara Movement meetings at Harper's Ferry in mid-summer of 1906, and
• Then, in August, Washington's Negro Business League in Atlanta (Wedin, pp. 74-76).

In September 1906, the worst race riots of the decade occurred in Atlanta. 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 Founding of the NAACP

The year 1908 was a difficult one for Mary Ovington because the commitment that she believed Henry Phipps had made to her was as mentioned 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 after a lecture 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 and 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" 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's 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 and Jewish men, which based on Wedin's account would unfairly eliminate recognition for the huge and patient 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, where I was then posting my comments on these topics.

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–with Walling Chairman, Milholland Treasurer and Villard  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).

DuBois under Taft

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. This reversed Theodore Roosevelt's policy of standing firm with black appointments in the south. Taft's "Southern Policy" supported whites' protesting against black appointees. Taft removed most black office holders in the South, and made few black appointments in the North.

In 1909, Booker T. Washington argued for training blacks should be trained 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 for more proactive steps toward equality, but Taft preferred to support Booker Washington's strategy. Black people in both the North and South began their drift toward the Democratic party that exploded in 1932.


Du Bois, Later Years

Ib 1910-34, DuBois edited the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. It had more than 100,000 readers. He 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.

Du Bois left the NAACP but rejoined in 1944-48, breaking 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.

The NAACP is still going strong, fighting racism and bridging cultural divides. It is headed by my friend Cornell Brooks. Last year on August 15 a predecessor of Brooks as an officer of the NAACP, former Chairman Julian Bond, died.

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

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