The Convergence of Medicine, Suffrage, and the NAACP

• 1909Formation of the NAACP
• 1916First birth control clinic in the United States opens in Brownsville
• 1906Dr. Jones assumes the presidency of the Brooklyn Equal Suffrage League

The political infrastructure established by figures like Garnet and Steward paved the way for subsequent generations of civil rights leaders who utilized Brooklyn as a base of operations. Chief among them was Dr. Verina Morton Jones, an intellectual titan whose career bridged medicine, social welfare, and political enfranchisement. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1865, Dr. Jones enrolled at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1884, earning her medical degree in 1888. She subsequently relocated to the South, where she made history as the first woman—of any race—to pass Mississippi's medical board examination and practice medicine in the state.³⁹

In 1890, Dr. Jones moved to Brooklyn with her husband, Dr. Walter A. Morton, where they established a medical practice, making her the first Black female physician to practice in neighboring Nassau County. Dr. Jones’s tenure in Brooklyn illustrates the intersectionality of early 20th-century activism. Recognizing that physical health was inextricably linked to social equality, she established the Lincoln Settlement House, which provided critical social infrastructure—kindergartens, nurseries, and clinics—to underserved Black families, creating institutions that the state refused to provide.³⁹

Simultaneously, Dr. Jones assumed the presidency of the Brooklyn Equal Suffrage League in 1906, directly continuing the work of Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet and Dr. Steward. Under her leadership, the League honored Susan B. Anthony and sponsored mock political conventions, relentlessly challenging both racist and sexist barriers to voting. Dr. Jones's activism brought her into the inner circle of the nascent civil rights movement; she worked closely with W.E.B. Du Bois, was featured in The Crisis magazine in 1912, and later directed the Harriet Tubman Community Club in Hempstead, Long Island.^39,32

This same era in Brooklyn produced vital white allies who fundamentally shaped the trajectory of American civil rights. Mary White Ovington, born in Brooklyn in 1865 to a wealthy family steeped in abolitionist traditions, became a pioneering social worker, journalist, and a principal founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Radicalized by a 1903 speech by Booker T. Washington at the Social Reform Club, and driven by her deep sociological investigations into the conditions of Black New Yorkers—which resulted in her seminal 1911 text, Half a Man—Ovington realized that philanthropic gradualism was insufficient to combat systemic racism.⁴³

Following the horrific 1908 Springfield Race Riot, Ovington, along with journalists William English Walling, Oswald Garrison Villard, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ida B. Wells, released a statement on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, ultimately leading to the formation of the NAACP in 1909. The NAACP soon anchored itself near Brooklyn in a striking 12-story Beaux-Arts office building at 70 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, designed by architect Charles Alonzo Rich. Ovington's specific brilliance lay in her operational stewardship; she served as the organization's executive secretary, treasurer, and board chairman for nearly forty years, guiding its transition to Black leadership and mediating internal disputes. Under her watch, from 1920 to 1938, the NAACP flew a chilling flag outside its headquarters reading, "A man was lynched yesterday," forcing the reality of racial terror into the public consciousness of New York. Before her death in 1951, Ovington authored The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947), providing a foundational history of the organization she helped build.^43,47,45

A man was lynched yesterday

A parallel movement regarding bodily autonomy was also taking root in the working-class enclaves of the borough. On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger, a radical nurse and social activist, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States at 46 Amboy Street in the heavily immigrant Brownsville section of Brooklyn. By choosing Brownsville—a dense neighborhood characterized by extreme poverty, crowded tenements, and high birth rates—Sanger made a profound statement that reproductive autonomy was inherently a matter of economic and class warfare. Though the clinic was swiftly raided and shut down by authorities, the establishment of the Amboy Street facility remains a landmark moment in global feminist history, securing Brooklyn's reputation as a geography where marginalized groups successfully challenged the fundamental tenets of state control over the body.^48,49