Flashback, July 1905: Leaders Protest US Civil-Rights Reverses at Niagara Meeting

Frustrated alike by reversals of hard-won rights and by accommodation to the injustice by the most prominent African-American leader in the United States, public intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois (pictured) and 29 other activists concluded a meeting at Niagara Falls 120 years ago this week with a ringing call to end racial discrimination and disenfranchisement.

That last sentence contains two words that require additional explanation. By “Niagara Falls,” I refer not to the wonderful waterfall in the United States but the one over the border in Canada. That’s because the organizers’ hope for an American site was immediately foiled by one of the conditions they were protesting: unequal accommodations. Unable to find lodging, the group had to look north, to the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois argued that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” The struggle to erase the color line would consume his attention for the remaining six decades of his life.

But at this point, it led to a sharper break with the educator he had till now gingerly blamed for not pressing more aggressively to advance their race: Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington.

At the simplest level, their differences involved economic (Washington) versus political (DuBois) strategies. Washington’s emphasis on industrial-based education, DuBois believed, siphoned money from liberal-arts program.

In his “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” section of The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois, while crediting his sincerity and acknowledging his sensitive position vis-à-vis whites, had outlined the damage he had done, noting that “so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.”

Now, at the Niagara meeting, he and other activists dissatisfied with Washington--a leader, they were increasingly coming to believe, was trying to crush his critics in the movement--presented a more wide-ranging, militant program of reform—a “Declaration of Principles” encompassing suffrage, education, justice, courts, public opinion, segregated railroad cars, the military, Christian preachers’ acquiescence to curtailing civil rights, and labor unions.

The West, unlike the other three regions of the country, was not represented at the meeting. Neither were women, to their considerable consternation.

(Eventually, when pressed by outraged female activists, DuBois offered a compromise for the next meeting: women could attend, but without congregating with male delegates—an ironic gender equivalent of “separate but equal.”)

The Niagara organizers’ problems with Democrats were of long standing; this was, after all, the party that won back the South through sustained resistance to Reconstruction in the 1870s, then began to slip away at all the gains won by blacks in the Civil War.

But their anger was now also aroused by the Republican Party, which, despite assurances to the contrary, had done nothing to advance the cause of civil rights in Congress.

The following year, interest in the cause had grown, which the attendees now meeting in Harpers Ferry, WV, the site of John Brown’s raid on a federal armory that, the activists felt, was his “martyrdom.”

Such was the segregationist state of American news, however, that the Niagara Movement could only publicize the cause within the African-American community.

Lack of financial support led to the dissolution of the movement by the end of the decade. But it had achieved its purpose by setting an ambitious civil-rights agenda and by throwing down a challenge to Washington.

In 1909 Niagara movement members joined forces with other civil-rights organizations and white allies to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which presented a more high-profile platform for the cause.

In helping to form the NAACP, DuBois insisted on a lesson he had learned through leading the Niagara movement: the structure of the organization should be bottom-up rather than top-down, including affordable fees to encourage membership. Such changes would be helpful in rallying African-Americans to defend their rights and to change white opinion.

Quote of the Day (Taylor Branch, on MLK and the March on Washington)

“[Martin Luther] King's ‘I Have a Dream’ speech abides. Contrary to popular impression then and lingering insistence today, he did not win favor by promising that African Americans would behave like white people. He said nearly the opposite, quite plainly. His ringing conclusion invited polyglot America — ‘all God's children’ — to join hands and sing a Negro spiritual, so that everyone, for that moment, could share inspirations forged during slavery. King invoked a larger patriotism in which people of every stripe reach from tiptoe stance across divisions between them. Free citizenship requires meeting each other halfway to build ties of comfort and strength. King's burden was not the tiptoe stance itself but flat-footed disregard on the other side. His reward was small miracles of common purpose that made ‘movement’ the watchword of national politics.”—Historian Taylor Branch, “Pulitzer Prize Winner Taylor Branch Reflects on 1963 March,” USA Today, Aug. 27, 2013

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reproving the Contemporary Church as ‘An Archdefender of the Status Quo’)

“There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were ‘a colony of heaven,’ called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be ‘astronomically intimidated.’ By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.

“But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”—Civil-rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Apr. 16, 1963

Sixty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., jailed for participating in a nonviolent civil rights protest in Birmingham, Ala., read a statement in a local newspaper from eight fellow clergymen, taking him to task for “unwise and untimely” direct action rather than pursuing justice through the courts. Veering between profound disappointment and righteous anger, the civil-rights leader began to scribble his response—at first in the margins of the original article itself, then in paper provided by a black jail trusty, even on toilet paper.

After the scraps were smuggled out by aides and reassembled in a nearby hotel into 20 typed pages, the resulting “Letter from Birmingham Jail” proved as startling in content as in composition. It transcended its origin as an open letter to the seven Protestant ministers and one rabbi to become a seminal document of the civil-rights movement.

Many passages have become among the most famous in King’s entire eloquent output, including:

* “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily”;

* “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will”; and especially

* “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

The letter is filled with allusions to religious figures, providing a common frame of reference with the ministers who criticized him and laying the groundwork for a powerful rhetorical answer to them: Jesus, St. Paul, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich.

Most pointedly, he cited St. Thomas Aquinas to prove that “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law”—part of his justification for the necessity of civil disobedience against segregation.

Read even in the context of its own time, King’s letter demonstrates an aspect of his career that often is forgotten today: his radicalism, even when it came to criticizing Southern white moderates, such as the eight clergymen who sympathized with his goals but disagreed with his tactics.

At the same time, it points to his understanding of the need for broad-based activism beyond simply voting rights and de jure segregation. In our time, that concern has been given the unfortunate, academic-sounding coinage “intersectionality.”

But King, with his typical pungency, expressed the matter more memorably: “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states….Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

In the last years of his short life, King took a stance that, again, many activists—including longtime allies—regarded as a bridge too far by assailing the Vietnam War. He took his fateful trip to Memphis in 1968 to aid a sanitation workers’ strike that had been sparked by low wages and appalling working conditions. (In early February two black employees, forbidden by city policy from taking refuge from storms by standing on porches and forced to take refuge in the barrel of their garbage truck, died when the vehicle malfunctioned.)

Today, he would protest inadequate health care, environmental injustice, and gun laws that rip apart people of all races, ethnicities, and classes—all operating under the conviction, like the demonstrators sitting down at segregated lunch counters in his time, that they would be “standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

(Asking whether an “email, tweeted press release or lengthy text message from Birmingham Jail [would] carry the same gravitas,” Vanecia Carr’s thoughtful January 2022 blog post considers “The Power of a Paper Letter.”)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on MLK and Malcolm X)

“I don’t think that any black person can speak of Malcolm [X] and Martin [Luther King Jr.] without wishing that they were here. It is not possible for me to speak of them without a sense of loss and grief and rage; and with the sense, furthermore, of having been forced to undergo an unforgivable indignity, both personal and vast. Our children need them, which is, indeed, the reason that they are not here: and now we, the blacks, must make certain that our children never forget them. For the American republic has always done everything in its power to destroy our children’s heroes, with the clear (and sometimes clearly stated) intention of destroying our children’s hope. This endeavor has doomed the American nation: mark my words.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “Malcolm and Martin,” in No Name in the Street (1972)

(I took the image accompanying this post over four years ago, while visiting the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC.)

Flashback, April 1967: King Breaks With LBJ in Fiery Anti-War Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (seen here, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964) spoke out more directly and passionately against the Vietnam War than he ever had before 50 years ago this week, in a controversial address, “Beyond Vietnam,” at New York’s Riverside Church. The Nobel laureate’s break with Lyndon B. Johnson, who had helped pass civil-rights legislation King had long advocated but who was now pursuing a conflict that the minister regarded as “madness,” came amid a year of personal anguish and reduced effectiveness in leading his movement.

As King looked out on April 4, 1967, at the Morningside Heights congregation, hosted by the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, he was aware that opponents had been questioning his direction over the past year. His 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., followed by passage of the Voting Rights Act a few months later, was his last significant victory. Since then, he had endured:

*a failed “Chicago Campaign” that failed to alter either de facto discrimination in the city’s housing or the broader plight of its African-American population;

*criticism from “Black Power” activists that his continued belief in nonviolent protest was too accommodating to white power structures; and 

*gnawing self-doubt about his purpose as a leader. Once, he burst out at a meeting with associates that he wished he could simply be the pastor of a small church again. Instead, he had decided, while on a vacation that winter to finish his latest book, to embrace a broader role implied by his Nobel Prize: an advocate for wider social justice.

Above all, he was growing uneasy over American involvement in the Vietnam War and the collateral damage to African-Americans, the nation’s poor and world peace. At last, he told the full house at Riverside, he felt compelled to ‘‘break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.’’

At this point widespread public recognition that the American involvement in the conflict was a failure had not yet crystallized. (In fact, it hadn’t even coalesced among African-Americans. Even after King’s address, only a quarter of blacks backed his stance on the war, according to one opinion poll.) That meant he was already veering far out on a limb, particularly for a white population (already annoyed, even suspicious, about his protests) who thought he was getting even further from his core role than he should.

King’s constant traveling as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference left him little time to write a speech with such momentous implications for his cause. His associate Andrew Young helped stitch the address together with significant input from attorney Clarence Jones and King’s close friend Vincent Harding. “He knew that I would not be putting words into his mouth. I would simply be speaking as my friend would want to speak, and that was the way that I went about the task that he asked me to do,” Harding recalled in a 2008 interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman included on the Website Democracy Now.

In his address, King reviewed the course of the war and offered reasons why he had come to oppose it--notably, diverted government resources and energy from the Great Society legislation proposed by LBJ only two years before, and the disproportionate impact of the conflict on the poor, who were forced to send “their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”

With time, King’s general rationale was repeatedly confirmed (e.g., “we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.”) But two examples of rhetorical overkill undercut the speech’s effectiveness: 1) What did Vietnamese peasants think of America, he asked, “as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” 2) In bombing defenseless villages, King claimed, the U.S. government had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 

It was predictable that conservatives would fire back after the speech, taking their cue from William F. Buckley Jr., who termed it “one of the greatest acts of intellectual confusion in recent history.” The godfather of modern conservatism continued: “Dr. King gave a speech which could have been written in, indeed it was for all intents and purposes written in, Hanoi.”

More problematic for the future direction of liberalism in the U.S. was that King’s speech was condemned by such mainstream progressive media as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as such prominent African-American leaders as Urban League head Whitney Young and the player who broke baseball’s color line, Jackie Robinson. The board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People even voted unanimously in favor of a resolution assailing his speech as a “serious tactical mistake.”

Most ominously for King’s future well-being, President Johnson was dangerously angered by King’s turn against him. He didn’t stop at merely referring to King in private as "that godd---ed n---er preacher." Instead, he stopped ignoring J. Edgar Hoover’s constant drumbeat of criticisms of the civil-rights leader and even asked his press secretary to distribute the FBI’s information about King’s ties with alleged Communist Stanley Levison to favorite reporters. 

The animus caused by his Riverside speech may have helped fulfill King’s sense of his prophetic mission, but it came at the price of making him feel increasingly like a target, according to Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, who in January told USA Today: “There were a lot people who preferred that (King) be dead. If they wouldn’t bring it about, they certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have survived the ‘60s in any case.”

On April 4, 1968, less than a week after Lyndon Johnson announced he would not be seeking re-election—and exactly one year since King had denounced the President’s Vietnam policy so dramatically—the civil-rights leader was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

This Day in Legal History (Marshall Points Commerce-Clause Dagger at States’ Rights)

March 2, 1824—In the last year of what might be termed Jeffersonian Republicanism, John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, continued to strike at the Democratic-Republican Party he had shadow-boxed in more than two decades on the high court.  In Gibbons v. Ogden, he did more than merely decide between two competing steamboat owners, or even establish a precedent that would govern use of the interstate-commerce clause of the Constitution  in everything from the navigation innovations of the 19^th century to the telecommunications revolution of the 21^st.  

No, Marshall—himself a Virginia slaveowner—insisted that, whenever the two conflicted, federal power superseded state power. That nationalist vision repudiated the notions of states’ rights and secession secretly promoted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. The enhanced authority this throwback to the now-defunct Federalist Party presented to Congress to pass laws relating to interstate commerce would, in time, become a weapon for abolitionists for the antebellum era, and even for civil-rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s.

A second cousin to Jefferson, Marshall, still vigorous in his late sixties, had outlasted Jefferson, Madison, and now his childhood friend, James Monroe. More infuriating to the Sage of Monticello, Marshall had pulled within his gravitational orbit most of the men that the Democratic-Republican Party had nominated to the high court, in the vain hope of counteracting his influence.

After justices had heard oral arguments, they reviewed the day’s business quickly in their cramped boardinghouse, where the chief’s mastery of men matched any mere President. For a man considered the bulwark of conservatism in the young republic, he put on no airs. (On a visit to the John Marshall House in Richmond some years ago, I was astonished to find that not only did he do his own food shopping in the city streets, but also that he was such a careless dresser that he needed the help of one of his slaves to ensure he looked presentable on special occasions.)

The court’s decision in Gibbons v. Ogden promised to be among them. Daniel Webster, the lead counsel for the case’s appellant, Thomas Gibbons, had drawn a crowd to see if he could deliver another persuasive argument, as he had done in two other landmark Marshall Court decisions (Dartmouth College v. Woodward and McCulloch v. Maryland), and the future Senator from Massachusetts didn’t disappoint. Moreover, commercial interests in New York were keenly watching a young go-getter in the background of the case, Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose tough, even ruthless management of Gibbons' boat had elicited the rancor of the latter's former steamboat partner, Aaron Ogden.  

The case had developed originally because the New York State Assembly had awarded a steamboat monopoly on the Hudson River to politician Robert Livingstone and inventor Robert Fulton. In turn, Livingstone allowed Ogden to navigate the waters between New York and New Jersey with this new mode of transportation. When Ogden fell out with Gibbons, the latter obtained a license to navigate under the federal Coasting Act of 1793. The New York state courts consistently sided with Ogden, until Gibbons played his last trump card and appealed to the Supreme Court.

In siding with Gibbons, Marshall struck down a monopoly that was restraining the growth of a new industry. The decision allowed a host of entrepreneurs who were trying to follow up on Fulton’s steamboat to ply their trade throughout the country. In particular, it “opened the floodgates for the Hudson River,” according to Fulton biographer Kirkpatrick Sale. Together with the Erie Canal (opening a year after the Ogden decision), the steamboat would transform the American interior, uniting East and West through strengthened commercial ties.

But Marshall was engaging in something larger: an adroit, step-by-step process by which he erected a legal foundation for his vision of a mercantile, contract-bound society that would unite all sections of a disparate republic into a true nation. Webster crowed that Marshall imbibed his arguments “as a baby takes in his mother’s milk,” but, in truth, the Chief Justice merely did with the attorney what he had done so successfully with his associate justices: gleefully employed their reasoning as a means of advancing his own constitutional strategy.

Crucially, in interpreting Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution—i.e., the power given to Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes”—Marshall construed the verbiage broadly to mean not simply the artifacts of commerce, but the whole “intercourse” by which it was conducted. Then, turning to the phrase “among the several states,” he argued for its widest possible application, limited only by the Constitution itself: “Commerce among the states, cannot stop at the external boundary line of each state, but may be introduced into the interior.”

Predictably, Jefferson and his followers did not look benignly on what they saw as yet another incursion by the Chief Justice on states’ rights. But Gibbons v. Ogden proved to be among the Marshall Court’s most popular decisions. Its wide acceptance, in fact, enabled opponents of slavery to wonder if it couldn’t be applied in overthrowing a system they abominated.

The domestic slave trade relied on the “chattel principle,” the notion that slaves were movable property. While most Americans thought that slavery could not be interfered with within individual states, abolitionists saw an increasing point of vulnerability to the peculiar institution in slave trade between states, which would fall under the commerce power.

Abolitionists’ denunciation of the interstate slave traffic, historian David L. Lightner argues in Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War, threatened alike plantation owners in older states (who needed proceeds from sales of surplus slaves to supplement their increasingly narrow profit margins) and those in the Deep South (who needed the labor to farm newly opened territories). Slaveowners’ paranoia about this perceived threat to their livelihood boosted the secessionist movement and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

A century after the Civil War, the administration of Lyndon Johnson crafted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in such a way that the commerce power could be used to outlaw segregation and prohibit discrimination against African-Americans. It provided the federal government a wedge to charge non-state actors with Equal Protection violations. It also became a tool by which Congress could regulate manufacturing, child labor, workplace safety, farm production, mass media of communication, wages and hours of work, the activities of labor unions, buying and selling at marketplaces, and various other activities.

All of this began with a Chief Justice who served under five Presidents, making what was widely expected to be the weakest branch of the federal government into one with its own unrivaled authority. Marshall did so through a self-confidence that allowed him to range widely over the law while gratefully accepting the expertise of particular justices; the sure-footed instinct to know how far to push a point without incurring the full wrath of Jefferson and his followers (a point I mentioned in a prior post about how he conducted the Aaron Burr treason trial); and a conviviality that furthered the good feelings among the associate justices with liberal amounts of alcohol. 

The justices had a rule about drinking only when it was raining, but, as might be guessed, Marshall used a broad interpretation of their jurisdiction to decide when that applied. He would sometimes ask Associate Justice Joseph Story to “step to the window and see if it does not look like rain.”  If Story said the sun was “shining brightly,” Marshall would often answer, “our jurisdiction extends over so large a territory that the doctrine of chances makes it certain that it must be raining somewhere.”  That was the signal for the bottles to open, and in the ensuing time spent together, the Chief undoubtedly sounded extra persuasive...