Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder - Softcover

"Ovington's memoirs provide a rare glimpse into the rich history of the NAACP. That one of the founders of this pivotal group was a woman, and a white woman at that, highlights relations between gender and power as well as those between race and power. . . The story of the woman who became 'chairman' of the most influential civil rights organization in the history of the United States, who traveled back and forth across the country to make speeches about racial equality, is a story worth hearing. . . The publication of these reminiscences fills a gap both in black history and women's writing; keeps open the conversations on race, gender, and class; and gives us all something to celebrate."
--Wilson Library Bulletin

"Historians . . . reassessing the role of the NAACP in the US civil rights struggle . . . and lovers of history and biography will be glad these Depression-era reminiscences of the Euramerican woman most deeply involved with the NAACP from its 1909 formation until her death in 1951 have been rescued from the archives of the Baltimore Afro-American, where they appeared in 1932-33."
--Booklist (starred review)

"An intriguing memoir, remarkable as much for what it doesn't reveal as what it does. . . . The Feminist Press deserves credit for beginning the process of recovering the complete picture of Ovington's career."
--Women's Review of Books

In 1903, when white settlement worker Mary White Ovington was 38, she had no sense that there was a "racial problem" in the United States. Six years later, she, W.E.B. DuBois, and fifty others founded the NAACP. Their goals included ending racial discrimination and segregation, and achieving full civil and legal rights for African-Americans—a dream that is still alive today, along with the organization they founded.

Ovington's candid memoir reveals a corageous woman who defied the social restrictions placed on women of her generation, race, and class, and became part of an inner circle that made the decisions for the NAACP in its first forty years. Her actions often brought unwelcome notoriety—as when lurid newspaper headlines announced her attendance at a biracial dinner in 1908—yet she continued working side-by-side with such colleagues as DuBois, James Wheldon Johnson, and Walter White, and began travelling across the country to help establish NAACP chapters in the Deep South, the Midwest, and California.

Serialized in the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper in 1932 and 1933, Ovington's memoirs are here available for the first time in book form. Black and White Sat Down Together offers an insider's view of a seminal phase in the struggle for civil rights, and a moving encounter with a woman who was hailed in her time as a "fighting saint."