In the winter of 1890, shortly before her graduation from The Packer Collegiate Institute, Mary White Ovington and a male companion attended a lecture at Plymouth Church given by the renowned Frederick Douglass. "The night was to me a great event," she later wrote . "I had come face to face with one of my heroes." This love of the heroic led Ovington to her life’s work, a work which would prompt her to become a founder of the NAACP in 1910 and to work tirelessly for racial justice until her death at the age of 86. Growing up in an uncompromising abolitionist family in Brooklyn Heights, Ovington found thrilling the stories of "the slave in his insurrections and his escapes from serfdom, in Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and a host of others." Stories of Abolitionists Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and Robert Bruce also filled her childhood. During family summers in the country, she spent her evenings in undisturbed study of the constellations. "The North Star I cared for most," she wrote. "It embodies heroism."

While she was a student at Packer, Ovington’s sensitive conscience may well have been inspired by the ideals emerging among young women of privilege in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1883, Alice Chadwick, Chairman of Packer’s Board of Alumnae, reaffirmed the school’s direction. Women were to be prepared not for sheltered domestic lives but for meaningful roles in the world. Truman Backus was selected as President and began the changes which led Packer from the Victorian to the modern era. Backus replaced the word "ladies" with "women" in the school catalogue, purchased fifty dumbbells for calisthenics classes, strengthened the science curriculum, and substituted ethics for religious study. Florid Victorian prose was replaced in composition classes with independent thinking. "He waked us up and kept us awake," wrote one student. "He made us do our own thinking."

In the 1890s, the Settlement Movement was a topic frequently thought about at Packer. Founded in 1890 by Progressives Jane Addams and Sophonsiba Breckinridge, among others, the College Settlement Association was "a feminist force to be reckoned with for civic leaders." Settlement workers, by living among immigrants and providing social services, hoped to understand and to mitigate the suffering of the poor. In 1894, Florence Judd Anderson writes in the Packer Alumna the Settlement is "a natural and intelligent effort to relieve both the scarcity and over-accumulation of advantages in society, by uniting in a common bond of friendship classes that would otherwise have been strangers and possibly antagonists." In 1900, Packer joined the College Settlement Association.

Ovington’s own work began with the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn. She was to remain at Greenpoint seven years, observing in detail the conditions of Irish immigrant families employed in urban factories. Recalling her early admiration for African Americans, Ovington resolved to begin a settlement for blacks arriving in New York from the South. In preparation for this work, Ovington received a grant from Greenwich House to begin her groundbreaking study of black urban life Half A Man: The Status Of The Negro In New York, published in 1911. An early work in the fledgling field of sociology and still a standard reference, Half a Man included not only meticulous studies of tenements but careful interviews with professionals and successful entrepreneurs. In 1906, as one of the country’s first female reporters, she covered for the New York Post the Niagra Movement, headed by W.E.B. DuBois, and the National Negro Business League, headed by Booker T. Washington.

At the time, Washington and DuBois represented two clear polarities in African American Leadership. In his conciliatory Atlanta Exposition Speech of 1895, Washington had endorsed the South’s segregationist policies by presenting the hand as a metaphor, promising that black and white could remain "as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Washington’s speech had made him popular with monied white interests, yet the activist Ovington rejected his methods. "Cease to think of lynchings, of injustice, of the loss of the ballot," she wrote. "Washington was greeted with profound relief."

Ovington’s life-long association with the radical DuBois began at the second meeting of the Niagra Movement at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Unlike Washington, DuBois and his allies demanded sweeping social changes. "We claim for ourselves," wrote DuBois, "every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and to assail the ears of America."

Further inspired by DuBois, Ovington continued her work for racial equality, setting up residence in a model tenement in San Juan Hill, an African American neighborhood in Manhattan’s West 60’s. Denounced in the press as "decadent" for her political association with African American leaders, Ovington, undaunted, turned her attention to the problem of lynching and to the increasing frequency of race riots in both the South and the North. With the assistance of Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling, and others, Ovington founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. Soon afterward, DuBois joined the NAACP staff as Director of Publicity and Research, publishing in its journal The Crisis some of his most incisive commentary on race. Ovington’s accomplishments as a writer, activist, and educator continued throughout her long life. Among her works are Portraits in Color, an anthology of biographies of African Americans for use in New York City public schools, The Awakening, a play, and The Walls Came Tumbling Down, a history of the NAACP.

"In writing, as in speaking, she was effectively subtle, gentle, and tough," writes her biographer Carolyn E. Wedin. "Over and over again, she responded to kudos with wonderment that she should be praised for doing what she most wanted to do." A woman of unfailing faith, she continued to believe that "the miracle is always here if someone will call it forth."

— Linda Gold