William English Walling (1877–1936),
Founder of the NAACP.
Intercollegiate Socialist Society
the Women’s Trade Union League,
the Social Democratic League,
He was born into wealth in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Willoughby Walling, a physician who had inherited much real estate, and Rosalind (English) Walling. He had an older brother, Willoughby George Walling. His father’s family were slave owners before the American Civil War. The boys’ maternal grandfather was William Hayden English, a successful businessman and the Democratic candidate from Indiana for vice president in 1880.
Wiliam Walling was educated at a private school in Louisville, he attended the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. After his grandfather died while he was in college, he inherited a private income. He became a liberal and progressive, active in New York social movements and politics.
He worked at Hull House in Chicago, an early settlement house. He vowed to live on the equivalent of a worker’s wage. Moving to New York City in 1900, he worked as a factory inspector. In 1903 he founded the National Women’s Trade Union League.
In 1906, following a lengthy trip to Russia to report on the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905 he married Anna Strunsky, a Jewish immigrant and an aspiring novelist from San Francisco. They had four children together: Rosamond, Anna, Georgia and Hayden.In 1908 he published Russia’s Message, a book inspired by the social unrest he and his wife had observed in Russia. In 1910 He joined the Socialist Party which lasted about several years. Eventually, he resigned because of its anti-war stance. He then became convinced that US intervention in the war was needed to defeat the Axis Powers.
In 1908 Walling and his wife Anna went to Springfield, Illinois to investigate a race riot that occurred on August 14 of ethnic whites against blacks, related especially to job competition and social change. As a result, Walling wrote an article, “The Race War in the North,” for the September 3 issue of The Independent. He said, “The spirit of the abolitionists, of Lincoln and Lovejoy, must be revived and we must come to treat the negro on a plane of absolute political and capitalist equality, or Vardaman and Tillman will soon have transferred the race war to the North.”He appealed for a large and powerful body of citizens to come to their aid.
Mary White Ovington wrote to him in support. She was one among a number of people, white and black, Christians and Jews, who were moved to create a new organization to work for civil rights. William English Walling was among the white founders of the NAACP, whose founding members included blacks, such as W.E.B. Du Bois from the Niagara Movement. They had some of their first meetings in his New York apartment. William served initially as chairman of the NAACP Executive Committee (1910–1911).
Walling became a member of the Republican Party, but quit in 1917 due to the party’s opposition to the US entering World War I. His marriage to Anna Strunsky ended at the same time. He later worked full-time for the American Federation of Labor. William English Wailing after years of hard work for equality passed in 1936.