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.