Joel Elias Spingarn

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Joel Elias Spingarn (May 17, 1875 - July 26, 1939) was an American educator, literary critic and civic activist.

[edit] Biography

Spingarn was born in New York City and was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University from 1899 to 1911. He was dimissed by the President of the University after offering a resolution in support of Harry Thurston Peck, a Columbia professor who had been recently dismissed over a scandal involving a breach-of-promise suit and possible adultery. In 1919 Spingarn was a co-founder of the publishing firm of Harcourt, Brace and Company, and he was to write such works asA History Of Literary Critism In The Renaissance, Creative Criticism And Other Essays.

Spingarn was an influential liberal Republican who helped settle a dispute between W.E.B. DuBois, whom he'd known at Harvard, and the followers of Booker T. Washington. He helped realize the concept of a unified black movement through the founding of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was one of the first Jewish leaders of the NAACP, its second president, and chairman of its board from 1913 until his death.

In 1913 he established the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually for outstanding achievement by an African American. He encouraged the works of African American writers during the Harlem Renaissance, a period of intense black literary activity in the 1920s.

Spingarn spoke rallying words ("I have a dream...of a unified Negro population") which seemed to presage Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

Spingarn ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in 1908, and was a member of the Board of Managers for the New York Botanical Gardens.

He had resided with his wife, Amy Einstein Spingarn, in what is now called the Troutbeck Inn and Conference Center in Amenia, New York.