Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement \\ 131
The NAACP, among all of Spingarn's involvements in the 1 910s, captured his
attention and claimed the largest share of his efforts. He first became interested
in the Association in 1910 when he read a newspaper account of the plight of
Steve Greene, an illiterate Black tenant farmer in Crittenclen County, Arkansas,
who had killed his former employer and landlord in self-defense and escaped to
Chicago. Greene fell into the hands of the police, who deprived him of food and
drink for four days while they questioned him about the shooting. He was identified
as the assailant by the nephew of the man he had shot, who boasted that a
mob was waiting to burn him back in Arkansas.
The NAACP was working to block Greene's extradition and to raise funds for
his legal defense, and Spingarn sent a check for $100. Years later, he reflected on
what it was that had struck him about that case as distinct from many others. A
man could never adequately explain, he said, "by what strange current of emotion
he is moved...why one injustice appeals to him more than another, but I know
that at that moment I said, 'I don't care what happens, Steve Green{e} will never
be extradited to Arkansas.'" 21 '
At the invitation of Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of the abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison and the editor of the New York livening Post, Spingarn
agreed, at year's end, to join the NAACP executive committee. By January 1914,
he had succeeded Villard as chairman of the board.
Almost from the moment Spingarn signed on, he made the NAACP virtually
a full-time job. He took on an array of tasks—fundraising, publicity, coordination
and support of branches—that would, by the 1920s, become the responsibility
of a salaried professional staff. At his own expense, beginning in 1913, he
traveled the country for three years on a "New Abolition" speaking tour, making
stops in more than twenty cities to solicit funds, recruit members, and publicize
the NAACP's program. In 1914, he endowed an annual award, the Spingarn
Medal, to be given by the NAACP to a Black man or woman of unusual distinction
and achievement. As well, Spingarn took a strong hand in shaping the
Association's earliest campaigns against residential segregation ordinances, Jim
Crow transportation statutes, civil service segregation, and lynching.
When Spingarn went into the Army in World War I, he temporarily relinquished
the chairmanship to Mary White Ovington, a social worker among
Blacks and immigrants in New York whose commitment to the NAACP bore the
stamp of het abolitionist heritage. In 1919, Ovington formally assumed the chairmanship,
whereupon Spingarn became treasurer of the Association. In 1931,
Spingarn was elected to the NAACP presidency to succeed Moorfaeld Storey, a
prominent Boston lawyer and past president of the American Bar Association; in
1932, he again assumed the NAACP chairmanship as well. Continuing to shape
the Association's financial policy, he exercised a close watch over the activities of
the salaried executives, particularly the NAACP secretary, Walter White. He was
much involved, as well, in mediating between White and Du Bois, then editor of