Mary White Ovington (April 11, 1865 – July 15, 1951) was an American socialist, suffragist, journalist, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Educated at Packer Collegiate Institute and Radcliffe College of Harvard University, Ovington became involved in the campaign for civil rights in 1890 after hearing Frederick Douglass speak in a Brooklyn church and a 1903 speech by Booker T. Washington at the Social Reform Club.

Mary was so appalled by their living conditions that she started working with Wells to force the city to update the tenements[citation needed].

There she met A. Philip Randolph, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman and Jack London, who argued racial problems were as much a matter of class as of race.

On September 3, 1908, she read an article written by Socialist William English Walling, entitled "Race War in the North", in The Independent.

Walling described a massive race riot directed at black residents in Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, that led to seven deaths, the destruction of 40 homes and 24 businesses, and 107 indictments against rioters.

The group decided to launch a campaign by issuing a call for a national conference on the civil and political rights of African Americans on the centennial of Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1909.

They appealed to the Supreme Court to rule that several laws passed by Southern states were unconstitutional and won three important judgments between 1915 and 1923 concerning voting rights and housing.

Ovington wrote several books and articles, including a study of black Manhattan, Half a Man (1911); Status of the Negro in the United States (1913); Socialism and the Feminist Movement (1914); an anthology for black children, The Upward Path (1919); biographical sketches of prominent African Americans, Portraits in Color (1927); an autobiography, Reminiscences (1932); and a history of the NAACP, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947).

Ovington also wrote novels and children's books, including Hazel (1913), which told the story of a young Boston Black girl spending a winter in Alabama at the turn of the century.