Ties That Bind: The Nation and the NAACP

Progressive politics and the quest for civil rights were in Oswald Garrison Villard's blood. His grandfather was the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator. His mother was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements, his father the owner of the literary supplement to the New York Evening Post, a.k.a. The Nation. So it was no surprise when the modern civil rights movement emerged from the ashes of the 1908 Springfield race riots, Villard was one of its driving forces.

It began in January 1909 when two New York social workers, Mary Ovington White and Henry Moskovitz, and the writer William English Walling gathered in a New York apartment to organize a group they hoped would aggressively address the country's racial issues. The trio invited Villard, then a staffer on the Post (nepotism occasionally has its benefits), to join them. Villard helped organize the subsequent convention out of which The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born. When the fledgling organization foundered, it was Villard who kept it together, and when the decision was made to pursue justice in the courts, it was Villard who took the lead in forming the NAACP's legal arm, which would prove so instrumental to the movement's success, culminating with its historic legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that made segregation illegal.

Villard became the editor and owner of The Nation upon his father's death in 1918. Over the years, however, Villard's politics gradually shifted toward the right. He sold The Nation in 1935 and would strongly disagree with the magazine's subsequent support for foreign intervention. He also joined the reactionary and anti-Semitic America First Committee. He died in 1949.

The Nation has a proud history, but its connection through Villard, to the most righteous of all Supreme Court decisions may be its greatest legacy. Look for a special section celebrating Villard and the NAACP on our Web site this month.

When the NAACP celebrated its fiftieth birthday, Flint Kellogg recounted the key role that Villard played in its founding. Here is the story from 1959.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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