How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began
by Mary White Ovington
(Excerpt from THE CRISIS, August 1914)

   Our history, after 1910, may be read in our annual reports, and in the numbers of THE CRISIS. We opened two offices in the Evening Post Building. With Dr. Du Bois came Frank M. Turner, a Wilberforce graduate, who has shown great efficiency in handling our books. In November 1910 appeared the first number of THE CRISIS, with Dr. Du Bois as editor, and Mary Dunlop MacLean, whose death has been the greatest loss the Association has known, as managing editor. Our propaganda work was put on a national footing, our legal work was well under way and we were in truth, a National Association, pledged to a nation-wide work for justice to the Negro race.

   I remember the afternoon that THE CRISIS received its name. We were sitting around the conventional table that seems a necessary adjunct to every Board, and were having an informal talk regarding the new magazine. We touched the subject of poetry.

   "There is a poem of Lowell's, I said, "that means more to me today than any other poem in the world - "The Present Crisis.""

   Mr. Walling looked up. "The Crisis, " he said. "There is the name for your magazine, The Crisis."

   And if we had a creed to which our members, black and white, our branches, North and South and East and West, our college societies, our children's circle, should all subscribe, it should be the lines of Lowell's noble verse, lines that are true to-day as when they were written seventy years ago.

Who are they?

Mary White Ovington (1865 - 1951)
Mary White Ovington, dedicated to racial equality, is credited with being the catalyst for the founding of the NAACP. The daughter of an affluent Caucasian family, she carried the legacy of a grandmother who was an abolitionist.

William English Walling (1877 - 1936)
American labor reformer and socialist. In 1903 with Jane Adams, he founded the National Women's Trade Union League. Witnessing a race riot in Illinois in 1908, he was led on to be one of the founders of the NAACP.

James Russell Lowell (1819 - 1891)
American Poet, essayist, editor, diplomat, and critic, James Russell Lowell founded the short-lived literary magazine The Pioneer, and served as first editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In 1867, he published the second series of Biglow Papers which opposed slavery and supported the North during the Civil War. From 1845 to 1850, he wrote approximately 50 antislavery articles.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood for the good or evil side;
Some great Cause, God's New Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right.
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt' darkness and that light.

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust.
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.