Amenia’s Joel Spingarn was key figure in NAACP’s nascent years

AMENIA — The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) last Saturday, March 30, did what it has always done well. Its Florida branch organized a protest. Marchers urged an arrest in the February killing of a 17-year-old by a neighborhood watch volunteer.That the NAACP, in its 103rd year, remains at the fore of the continuing struggle for equality and social justice in this country is no surprise. What may be a surprise to some is the role played by an Amenia resident, Joel Spingarn, who organized a critical conference attended by vibrant leaders and rising stars of the civil rights movement in 1933.Eben Miller, who teaches at Southern Maine Community College, has written a valuable and long-needed book that examines not only the conference itself, but singles out five of its participants for a closer look.The idea for “Born Along the Color Line” (Oxford University Press, 356 pages, $29.95), Miller said in an email, came from a photograph “of the conferees assembled in Amenia in August 1933. I was struck by this image. Here was a group of young African-American professionals and academics gathered during the depth of the Great Depression to discuss how best to pursue black equality.”Fluidity, change at TroutbeckThe gathering was at Spingarn’s Troutbeck estate.“I immediately had innumerable questions,” Miller went on. “I wanted to know all I could about who each of the figures were. I wanted to know what they discussed and debated. I wanted to know how and why they were chosen to represent their generation of young black leaders. I wanted to know why they met in Amenia. (After having visited Troutbeck during my research, I have a much better understanding of this.) Above all, I wanted to know how this event impacted the civil rights struggle.”Amenia wasn’t exactly unknown to the writer. His father, Garry Miller, grew up in Millerton and his grandfather, John C. Miller, still lives there.That the gathering was held at Troutbeck was due, certainly, to Spingarn’s participation. Additionally, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the NAACP’s founders, long gravitated to conference locations near water. The first Niagara Conference in 1905 was held at Fort Erie Beach, Ontario, on Lake Erie but in Canada, for example, and the second was in Harper’s Ferry, W.Va., at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers.Du Bois saw water as a cleansing source, a source of fluidity, of change.The pond at Troutbeck, an old iron ore bed, fit the mold. Participants swam or boated there.The 30-some guests slept in seven large canvas tents installed on the lawn. Men and women came to the conference. Meals and informal gatherings were in the big house. Attendees came mostly by train. Du Bois drove, and brought two others with him.“Amid the gardens,” Miller writes, “stood the Spingarn home, a 28-room, slate-roofed, gray stone mansion. Through its heavy casement windows, opened invitingly onto the grounds, were exposed-beam ceilings and a library befitting the former Columbia University professor of comparative literature turned gentleman gardener [Spingarn]. Lining the shelves were volumes from the Italian Renaissance, works of the American transcendentalists, local histories tracing the origins of Troutbeck to the 1760s, botanical treatises and Joel Spingarn’s own published poetry.”‘Comes the revolution’Here assembled a handpicked group from what was considered the “Talented Ten,” the smartest, most determined, hardest working of the black race.The main agenda item was the relevancy, in those Great Depression years, of the NAACP’s original mission. As discussion ensued, it became clear a new generation — among them youth activist Juanita Jackson, diplomat Ralph Bunche, economics specialist Abram Harris, attorney Louis Redding and Harlem grass roots organizer Moran Weston — were hugely concerned with economic and hardship issues.Ever provocative, Du Bois, who in his book “The Souls of Black Folk” had decried the color line as prohibiting Negroes from the same opportunities as whites, now suggested segregation as a tool; blacks, for example, should patronize only black banks, or black merchants. The idea was not a popular one.President Franklin D. Roosevelt was hard at work launching his New Deal initiatives, which some considered socialistic. Marxism waved its ugly head, but held only modest attraction for wary African-Americans.Though one delegate, Miller relates, entered the Spingarn villa, stood in the library and blurted, “‘Comes the revolution, man.”As Miller notes, the remark made Du Bois and others wince, but brought out the irony that the civil rights movement had long relied “upon the largess of ennobled white benefactors, such as the Spingarns.” (Joel’s brother, Arthur, provided legal expertise to the NAACP.)A collective effortIt was a critical year for the NAACP. Du Bois, whose Crisis magazine was a major expense to publish, was increasingly at odds with the new executive director, Walter White. Within months of the conference, Du Bois resigned and returned to Atlanta University and Spingarn cut off his tenure as board chairman.The NAACP moved into new hands, embraced new ideas. Among the published findings, note was made that “the exploitation of black workers had become the most debilitating. The urge was to merge efforts with the white labor movement. “The key,” Miller said, “was to convince existing betterment organizations that ‘the welfare of white and black labor are one and inseparable.’”Miller in explaining this zeroes in on several participants.“I ended up writing mainly about five of the Amenia delegates,” the author said. “I chose to write a collective biography because I thought the form could best convey the collective effort involved in the civil rights struggle. “Writing about these five figures also allowed me to explore how the movement changed over the course of the early 20th century (including the development of an economic agenda), as well as to examine the crucial role local communities … played in the movement.“Significantly, the focus on the 1933 Amenia Conference also gave me the opportunity to emphasize the importance of the NAACP during this early era of the civil rights movement. In this way, the book is an institutional history, as well as a collective biography, and testifies to the critical involvement of civil rights organizations in the long movement for African American freedom.”Troutbeck notes on its website, “It was Spingarn who originally spoke the rallying words of a later charismatic African-American leader, ‘I have a dream … of a unified Negro population.’ ”