sign in sign up
<<
Home , Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling

NAACP Cabinet - 1909

Letter from the Chairs:

Hello! My name is Laetitia Hollard, and I’m a senior at McFarland High School. I’ve been organizing a lot of actions in support of Black Liberation these last few months. Thanks to all my experience with Model UN, I was able to sponsor three resolutions towards diversity, equity, and inclusion that passed in the McFarland Village board and the McFarland School District, and create the first DEI committee in McFarland. This kind of social action inspired me to create a committee in MADMUN motivated by ideas of equality and justice. I believe it’s important for everyone to recognize the extra challenges Black Americans face when working with policy and fighting for their human rights. I challenge you in this committee to constantly reflect on how the issues that this committee faces connects to current events and issues. Let this empower you to create the change this world needs.

Hi, I’m Esther Kassel! I’m a senior at Verona Area High School and also your Chief Strategy Officer at MADMUN. When I’m not planning this committee with Laetitia, I’m reading, painting, or organizing social action events with my Jewish Youth Group. I care very deeply for my community and I believe that through self-reflection, empathy, and understanding, we can motivate positive change. I would like you, as a student, to use this committee to understand the massive amount of challenges the pioneers of the Black Liberation movement had to go through to get where we are today. Obviously, we still have a long way to go, but hopefully you’ll use the knowledge and understanding you’ve gained from this committee and apply it to combat modern day issues impacting Black Americans. For non-black committee members: I also hope this committee empowers you to become a better ally and for you to amplify Black voices and Black platforms.

Have any questions? Need more resources for research? Confused about our committee? Please reach out by emailing either Laetitia or Esther:

Laetitia’s contact: [email protected] ​ Esther’s contact: [email protected] ​

History of Springfield Riots In the August of 1908, the white population of Springfield, quickly reacted to reports that a white woman was assaulted in her home by a Black man. Another report was made of a Black man assaulting a white woman just hours later. The police took both men, Joe James and George Richardson, into custody. These reports being announced so close together caused white supremacists to mobilize and create a mob in Springfield. The mob assembled outside of Sangamon County Courthouse to lynch the men in custody. When the Sheriff announced to the mob that the men had been moved to an undisclosed location, the mob turned its wrath to two nearby Black men. The first victim of the mob, Scott Burton, was killed when he used his shotgun in an attempt to save his life and home when the mob started shooting at him. The second, William Donegan, was killed as his reputation was long tainted since he had been married to a white woman for over 30 years. After the murders, the mobs weren’t appeased, and continued to vent their fury upon the homes of Black families in Springfield. The leaders carefully directed participants to destroy homes and businesses that were owned by Black people or served Black customers within Springfield and nearby towns. All white businesses remained untouched. Some Black civilians of Springfield fought in self-defense. However, when the destruction was finally over, six Black people were shot and killed, two were lynched, and over ​ 2,000 were forced to leave the city, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property destroyed.

Grandfather Clause After the Civil War, the 15th amendment was enacted in 1870. It signified the fulfillment of all promises to Black Americans who were set free by the 13th Amendment. Black males were given the vote by the 15th Amendment, and from that point, former abolitionists and the radical republican congressmen felt that they had fulfilled their promises, leaving Black Americans to fend for themselves. Despite the 15th amendment, Black Americans, especially those in the south, were kept from voting in large numbers for centuries more. Various requirements were created by states, including but not limited to literacy tests, poll taxes, and constitutional quizzes. These were created to keep Black Americans from registering to vote. Quickly, however, legislators realized that this law also negatively affected poor whites who were at risk of losing their voting rights. Their solution was a law that made men eligible to vote if they were able to vote before Black-Americans were given the franchise, or gave the right to people who were the descendants of voters who could vote during that period. Half a dozen states passed these laws, known as the Grandfather Clause. Most state legislatures would enact grandfather clauses even though they knew they were “grossly unconstitutional”. Most states would therefore include a time limit on the Grandfather Clause in hopes that many white people would register to vote before the clause was struck down by the courts. With Black Americans lacking the resources to follow suit, it is up to this committee to find ways to challenge the Grandfather Clause to the best of your abilities.

Committee Members: ​

1. W.E.B. du Bois Before William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’ involvement with the NAACP, he had already gained the titles of civil rights activist, sociologist, educator, and writer. Du Bois’ intellect and passion for knowledge led him to become the first African-American to receive a doctorate from in 1895 and teach Greek, Latin, sociology, economics, and history at several different universities in the U.S. He believed that capitalism was a major cause of racism, and he was largely sympathetic to socialist causes. In his 1903 work, The Souls of ​ Black Folk, du Bois reflects that “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of ​ dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” Du Bois had also made known his anti-colonial beliefs, and debunked racist white supremacist ideology, through his novel The World and Africa, where ​ ​ he details the history of Africa before the European exploration, enslavement, and colonization of Africa.

2. Ida B. Wells After the Civil War ended, Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s parents became politically active in Reconstruction Era politics, which instilled the importance of education into her. B. Wells became an educator to support her family after yellow fever took her parents. B. Wells found her start as an anti-lynching journalist. She investigated several cases of anti-black white mob violence, published her discoveries in a pamphlet, and wrote several columns in local newspapers in 1892. Her published articles on lynching eventually enraged locals, who drove her to Memphis and eventually Chicago, Illinois. In addition to being an educator and journalist, B. Wells was an active member of the women’s suffrage movement, despite being excluded and ridiculed by white women in the movement. In 1896, B. Wells, alongside other prominent African-American female activists, founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Club to address issues dealing with civil rights and women’s suffrage.

3. Mary White Ovington was born from supporters of the women’s rights movement and members of the anti-slavery movement. Educated and involved in politics from a young age, Ovington became involved in the civil rights movement in 1890 after hearing speak in a church. In 1895, she became involved in the Greenwich House Project, became the head of the project the following year, and remained on the project until 1904 when she was appointed as a fellow of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations. Inspired by the ideas of socialist activist , Ovington joined the Socialist Party in 1905 and began writing for radical journals and newspapers such as , the New York Evening Post, and The Call. On September 3, 1908, Ovington read an article written by socialist entitled “Race War in the North” in The Independent, which described the events of the Springfield Race riots. Ovington then decided to contact Walling and meet at his apartment in , along with social worker Dr. Henry Moskowitz, where they decided to launch a “call” for a national conference on the civil and political rights of African-Americans.

4. Henry Moskowitz ​ Born into a Jewish household in Husse, Romania, Henry Moskowitz and his family migrated to the in 1883, where he attended New York City public schools. Only a year later, he graduated from the in 1899 and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Erlangen, , in 1906. In 1907, Moskowitz helped organize the Madison House of the Downtown Ethical Society, a non-profit settlement house to combat serious issues that the then-growing immigrant population dealt with. Moskowitz was a practicing social worker in the early 1900s and continued his activism in the Ethical Culture Society, which allegedly began under a German-Jewish New Yorker, Professor Felix Adler.

5. Moorfield Storey was born to an abolitionist mother, whom he took after, especially later in life. His comfortable yet not necessarily wealthy background allowed him to pursue an independent course in life. As an undergraduate in university, he often skipped classes to go fishing or partied into the early hours of the morning. Nevertheless, Storey entered , only to drop out in his second year to serve as private secretary to Massachusetts senator , who was the then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “A war begun to win the Cubans the right to govern themselves should not be made an excuse for extending our sway over other alien peoples.” Storey proclaimed these famous words at ’s historic Faneuil Hall in 1898 in response to the US’s invasion of the Philippines. Soon after this speech, Storey became the first president of the newly formed Anti-Imperialist League. He published articles and speeches against imperialism, sent letters to newspaper editors, and corresponded heavily with prominent politicians. In addition to his anti-imperialist activism, Storey advocated for racial equality, specifically for Native Americans and Black Americans. He once famously said that “one of the greatest dangers which threaten this country today is racial prejudice, and it should be the duty of every person with any influence to discourage it.”

6. Oswald Garrison Villard was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to a journalist railroad tycoon father and suffragette mother. Thanks to his family’s influence, he graduated from Harvard and immediately became a writer for the New York Evening Post and , eventually becoming the publisher for both newspapers. He used his fortune to support liberal movements including women's suffrage, civil rights, and anti-imperialism. In 1908, Villard visualized a program to uplift Black people. He thought Black people should band together and support a large national organization to protect their rights. In this organization, he thought they could employ lawyers to prosecute lynchers, look at cases of discrimination in the courts, demand the restoration of civil rights, and become a publicity bureau to put real facts and statistics about Black people forth to the public. When Mary White Ovington brought activists together to speak upon the racial turmoil in the nation, Villard thought it was an appropriate opportunity to share his ideas for a new organization. When it became apparent that his plans were necessary to advance the movement, he wrote a document in 1906 named “Committee for the Advancement of the Negro Race,” which became the blueprints of the NAACP. Villard also funded the NAACP, and found a space for the NAACP to meet.

7. William English Walling William English Walling was born in Louisville to a rich former slaveholding family. When he was studying at the he was taught economics under a radical professor, Thorstein Veblen. During this time, Walling became a socialist. He traveled the world, learning and preaching about . He spent extensive time in St. Petersburg, Russia. Upon returning to the United States, he heard about the Springfield Riots in Illinois. He decided to visit the town to, in his words, “write a broad, sympathetic and non-partisan account.” ​ After arriving and understanding the ideology that pervaded the south, that people believed Black people didn’t need much education, that whites could not live in the same community with Black people except where Black people have been taught their inferiority, that lynching was the only way to teach Black people, and so on, he was appalled and proceeded to publish his article, Race War in the North. In this article, he spoke about the waging of permanent racial warfare in the United States. He thought the main solution to this issue was “to treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality.” He also suggested that racists were in danger of destroying democracy in the United States. Writers of the New York Evening Post, where Oswald Garrison Villard was the publisher, read his work and invited him to the meeting where the NAACP was eventually formed.

8. Mary Eliza Church Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to a successful businessman who became one of the South’s first African American millionaires and a hair salon owner. Her family’s wealth and belief in the importance of education enabled Terrell to attend the Antioch College Laboratory School in Ohio. Later, she attended Oberlin College, where she earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. After that, Terrell became a teacher at Wilberforce College and later, in 1887, taught at M Street Colored High School in Washington, D.C. When a close friend of Terrell’s was lynched in Memphis, she joined Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign. She began campaigning for racial uplift with personal advocacy through education, work, and community activism. Terrell became the first black woman to be appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education as the superintendent of the Dunbar High School. In 1896, Terell helped found the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) where her words—“lifting as we climb”—became the group's motto. She was the NACW president from 1896 to 1901, where she campaigned tirelessly among both Black organizations and mainstream white organizations and actively embraced women’s suffrage, especially Black women’s suffrage. Terrell fought for civil rights and women’s suffrage because she realized that she belonged “to the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount…both sex and race.”

9. John E. Milholland John Elmer Milholland was born in New York to Irish immigrants, but he and his family moved back to Ireland shortly after he was born, when their New York home burned down. Later, Milholland returned to the United States and attended New York University only to drop out two years later to become a journalist and editor for the Ticonderoga Paper, which he subsequently bought. After selling the Ticonderoga Paper, he took up a position at the New York Tribune and eventually became the chief editorial writer. Milholland also invested in the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Co., which worked on the first pneumatic tube lines in New York City, and eventually became the company’s president. By 1900, Milholland was worth 500,000 USD through expanding investments into other markets, eventually using his wealth to fund civil rights movements. Milholland was also a vocal anti-expansionist, founding the International Union Club in , which supported the Boers, also known as Afrikaners, who were the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa. In 1904, he created a partnership that controlled much of the pneumatic mail (a system to deliver letters through pressurized air tubes) in Europe. Milholland used much of his wealth to fund several civil rights activists, first Booker T. Washington and later W. E. B. Du Bois. Because of these donations, Milholland was criticized and was soon removed from the board of the pneumatic mail corporation. Despite this, he expanded his funding of civil rights, funding Mary Ovington and investing in Phipps Houses, a non-profit affordable housing organization in New York City.

10. Ray Stannard Baker was born from a pioneer New England family that had moved west to Lansing, Michigan. After graduating from Michigan State College in 1889, Baker enrolled in law school and then subsequently turned to journalism. He eventually began his career as a reporter for the Chicago News-Round where he covered the Pullman strike and 1893 march of the Coxey’s Army on Washington. Both of these events elevated Baker’s belief in social reform. In 1897, he began working for McClure's Magazine, where he wrote a series of exposes on pressing social issues. As he was becoming famous for his articles, he began working in the company of accomplished investigative journalists such as Ida Tarbell. In 1906, Baker became an editor for the American Magazine, a paper that was bought by him and other McClure employees. Baker also wrote philosophical essays and compiled country sketches which he published under the pseudonym David Grayson. After the Atlanta Massacre of 1906, he traveled throughout the South and North conducting interviews for Following the Color Line, a book on race relations published in 1908. Baker was divided between the philosophies of Booker T. Washington and the NAACP, and communicated with William English Walling before the NAACP’s first meeting on February 12, 1909.

Position Paper Requirements/Tips

● Formatting: 12 font size, double spaced, Times New Roman ​ ● Labeling: In the top right corner of your paper you must add your position (committee ​ member you are representing), your committee and starting year, and your first and last name, in that order ● Content: You will be writing your position paper in first person about your assigned ​ committee. We are looking for extensive research on your committee member’s position on civil rights and civil rights related issues in the early 20th century, as well as their history with civil rights. Remember that this committee begins on February 12, 1909 so please keep the actions of your committee members to February of 1909 or before. Questions to consider on your position paper are as follows: ○ What goals do I have for the civil rights movement? ○ What resources specific to my background can I use to elevate the civil rights movement and the NAACP? ○ Do I have any previous relationships with other NAACP members? If so, what do these relationships look like? ○ What do I want to accomplish as a founding member/part of the original Board of Directors of the NAACP?

Directives ● Directives are version of resolution papers, except they are executed more frequently. ● General directive tips: ○ Provide clear instructions ○ Be concise and to the point ○ Create your plan step-by-step ○ One issue per directive ● Types of directives: ○ Personal directives: between you and the backroom; used to further the cabinet interest, your personal interest, or both ○ Joint directives: submitted on behalf of a few committee members; usually used to further cabinet goals, but can also be used to further individual goals ○ Cabinet directives: usually written by one to two committee members; must be approved by the entire cabinet, or at least the chair; almost always used to serve cabinet goals ● If the backroom or the chairs believe your directive is not clear enough or not relevant, it will be overridden and not implemented into the simulation ● Please email us if you need more information on directives

Example joint directive: “Léon Gambetta and I are going to launch the revolution according to the following plan: a. The day before the revolution: using the bakeries we have acquired, we will poison the bread with ricin oil, and distribute it to the police force so that most of them are unable to operate the next day. b. The next day: referring to our directives on the emergency signals, these are to be known by all of the Republican soldiers, as well as the places where the weapons are hidden all over the capital city. We will then be able to launch the revolution within a few dozen minutes, so that the local police forces will not have time to respond. c. Out of the 10,000 armed men at our disposal, we will send 2,000 men to storm the National Assembly building from the 3 public entrances, and 100 men from the secret Catacomb passage, while the others will occupy other parts of the city, as was previously planned with the other Republican leaders. d. We clearly specify that the members of the Cabinet shall be made prisoners to be judged, except, of course, for Léon Gambetta – who is the rightful leader of our movement, but including thiers, so as to reduce the opposition to the very minimum time for us to set up Republican institutions. They should not be killed nor be allowed to flee. We ask the revolutionary army to bring them to the main Parisian prison.”

Bibliography

John Simkin. Spartacus Educational, Spartacus Educational, ​ ​ spartacus-educational.com/USAwalling.htm. Austrian, Geoffrey D. “Moorfield Storey.” Harvard Magazine, 12 July 2018, ​ ​ www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/07/moorfield-storey.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Mary Eliza Church Terrell.” Encyclopædia Britannica, ​ ​ Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Sept. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Eliza-Church-Terrell.

Greenblatt, Alan. “The Racial History Of The 'Grandfather Clause'.” NPR, NPR, 22 Oct. 2013, ​ ​ www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clau se.

“Hamilton-Madison House.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Sept. 2020, ​ ​ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton-Madison_House.

“Henry Moskowitz, Activist Born.” African American Registry, 26 May 2020, ​ ​ aaregistry.org/story/henry-moskowitz-activist-born/.

“Henry Moskowitz.” Moskowitz, Henry, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/moskowitz-henry. ​ ​ “How To Write a MUN Crisis Directive.” WiseMee, 28 July 2020, ​ ​ www.wisemee.com/how-to-write-mun-crisis-directive/.

Kellogg, Flint. “Oswald Villard, the NAACP and The Nation.” The Nation, 29 June 2015, ​ ​ www.thenation.com/article/archive/oswald-villard-naacp-and-nation/.

Michals, Debra. “Mary Church Terrell.” National Women's History Museum, ​ ​ www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-church-terrell.

“Milholland, John Elmer (1860-1925).” Digital Edition, ​ ​ digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/2588.

“NAACP History: W.E.B. Dubois.” NAACP, www..org/naacp-history-w-e-b-dubois/. ​ ​ Norwood, Arlisha R. “Ida B. Wells-Barnett.” National Women's History Museum, ​ ​ www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett.

Sweatpants & Equality | NAACP Day says: and Name *. “Villard, Oswald Garrison.” Social ​ Welfare History Project, 28 Apr. 2020, socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/villard/. ​ Yu, Karlson. “Springfield Race Riot, 1908.” Welcome to Blackpast •, 20 Aug. 2019, ​ ​ www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/springfield-race-riot-1908/.