Noted.

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. His mother was a leader in the women's suffrage movement, his father the owner of the literary supplement to the New York Evening Post, a k a The Nation. So it was no surprise that 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 Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz and William English Walling met in New York to organize a group they hoped would aggressively address the country's racial issues. The trio invited Villard, then president of the New York Evening Post Company (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 (NAACP) was born. When the fledgling organization began to founder, 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 in its historic legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Nation has a proud history, but its connection through Villard, who became its editor and owner upon his father's death in 1918, to the most righteous of all Supreme Court decisions may be among its greatest legacies. Look for a special section celebrating Villard and the NAACP on our website this month.

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