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 (Booker T. Washington, on Great Men and Little Men)

“I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.” —African-American educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (1901)

Quote of the Day (Booker T. Washington, on the Power of a ‘High, Pure’ Life)

“There is no power on earth,  that can neutralize the influence of a high, pure, simple and useful life.”—African-American educator, author and orator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), "The Virtue of Simplicity," from Character Building: Being Addresses Delivered on Sunday Evenings to the Students of Tuskegee Institute (1902)

(Photo of Booker T. Washington at Carnegie Hall, 1906, during his Carnegie Hall lecture on the silver anniversary of Tuskegee Institute; Mark Twain is seated just behind him. Photo appeared originally in The New York Times.)

Quote of the Day (Booker T. Washington, on “Questions of Social Equality”)

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”—Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” delivered September 18, 1895

Frederick Douglass had been dead less than a year when Booker T. Washington appeared before a white audience at the Atlanta Exposition on this date in 1895. It’s a safe bet, however, that the fiery abolitionist leader—who, on Independence Day in 1852, excoriated his countrymen for excluding blacks from the promise of freedom—would have found little to his liking in this speech.

A further irony: with the accommodationist message of his address, Washington, a former slave, became the leading spokesman for African-Americans, a position he held until his death, after two more decades of tireless work. (To that phrase “tireless work,” I should also include the adjective “ineffectual” and "frustrating," because Washington, an inveterate lecturer, had to become used to separate-but-equal—and substandard—accommodations on his numerous travels.)

Especially after the civil rights movement, Washington was dismissed as an Uncle Tom by many revisionist historians, notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Louis Harlan. (For a small sample of the latter’s work, see his summary of the educator in this entry from The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture). More recently, historian Robert Norell, in Up From History, has attempted to restore some balance to this sometimes overly harsh skepticism, noting the incredibly harsh environment then faced by African-Americans, including Washington himself in Tuskegee’s home state, Alabama. (Earlier that year, he had saved the life of a local African-American lawyer from a white mob, but only by refusing to acknowledge he had hidden the man in his own home.)

In certain ways, the key to Washington’s position might be found in one sentence quoted above: “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” That touching absolute faith in the marketplace continues to reverberate today (you can almost hear the voice of black conservative columnist Thomas Sowell speaking that line), but I’m afraid that it is contradicted by the facts of history.

One of the few businessmen who did confirm Washington’s belief was Gus Busch, who really did not care about the color of the fans of the team he owned, the St. Louis Cardinals, as long as they drank his beer. But far more often—and especially in the six decades between Washington’s so-called “Atlanta Compromise” and the young Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—American businessmen have been anything but enlightened when it came to the marketplace and human rights.

A final irony of this address: The refrain “cast your buckets where you are” came to be associated with what blacks would give up, but Washington also used it to undercut the relative position of another group: immigrants. White businessmen need not look to other white, foreign-born workers for cheap labor, he promised: They could get the same thing from native black workers—except that, in the case of the latter—a “patient” group—capitalists need not worry about the strikes then beginning to take hold in America.

In his desperate attempt to assure the survival of African-Americans, then, Washington ended up using his considerable prestige to undermine the status of his own race and immigrant whites. “Up From Slavery”? Perhaps, but not by much.