Niagara Movement


The Niagara Movement was a civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter with Mary Burnett Talbert. The Niagara Movement was organized to oppose racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Its members felt the policy of accommodation and conciliation, without voting rights, promoted by Booker T. Washington, was "unmanly." It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo during the week of July 9, 1905. To avoid a possible racist protest, Du Bois instead hired a small hotel across the border in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. The Niagara Movement was the immediate predecessor of the NAACP.

Background

During the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War, African Americans had an unprecedented level of civil freedom and civic participation. In the South, for the first time the former slaves could vote, hold public office, and contract for their labor. With the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, their freedoms began to narrow. From 1890 to 1908, all the Southern states ratified new constitutions or laws that disenfranchised most blacks and significantly restricted their political and civil rights. After Democrats regained control of state legislatures they passed laws imposing legal racial segregation in public facilities. These policies were entrenched after the United States Supreme Court in 1896 ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that laws requiring "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. The separate facilities for African Americans were often shabby, or they did not exist at all.
Image:WMTrotter1915.jpg|thumb|left|upright|William Monroe Trotter, 1915 photomechanical print
The most prominent African-American spokesman during the 1890s was Booker T. Washington, leader of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. In an 1895 speech in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington discussed what became known as the Atlanta Compromise. He believed that Southern African-Americans should not agitate for political rights as long as they were provided economic opportunities and basic rights of due process. He believed they needed to focus on education and work, to raise their race. Washington politically dominated the National Afro-American Council, the first nationwide African-American civil rights organization.
By the turn of the 20th century, other activists within the African-American community began demanding a challenge to racist government policies and higher goals for their people than those advocated by Washington. They believed that Washington was "accommodationist". Opponents included Northerner W. E. B. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, and William Monroe Trotter, a Boston activist who in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian newspaper as a platform for radical activism. In 1902 and 1903 groups of activists sought to gain a larger voice in the debate at the conventions of the National Afro-American Council, but they were marginalized because the conventions were dominated by Washington supporters. Trotter in July 1903 orchestrated a confrontation with Washington in Boston, a stronghold of activism, that resulted in a minor melee and the arrest of Trotter and others; the event garnered national headlines.
In January 1904, Washington, with funding assistance from white philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, organized a meeting in New York to unite African American and civil rights spokesmen. Trotter was not invited, but Du Bois and a few other activists were. Du Bois was sympathetic to the activist cause and suspicious of Washington's motives; he noted that the number of activists invited was small relative to the number of Bookerites. The meeting laid the foundation for a committee to include both Washington and Du Bois, but it quickly fractured. Du Bois resigned in July 1905. By this time, both Du Bois and Trotter recognized the need for a well-organized anti-Washington activist group.

Founding

Along with Du Bois and Trotter, Fredrick McGhee of St. Paul, Minnesota and Charles Edwin Bentley of Chicago also recognized the need for a national activist group. The foursome organized a conference to be held July 11–13, 1905, in Buffalo, New York with Buffalo resident Mary Burnett Talbert. 59 carefully selected anti-Bookerites were invited to attend; 29 showed up, including prominent community leaders and a notable number of lawyers. At the last minute, to avoid disruption, the meeting was moved to the Erie Beach Hotel in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada, across the Niagara River from Buffalo.
The organization founded at this meeting chose Du Bois as its general secretary and Cincinnati lawyer George H. Jackson as treasurer. It set up committees to oversee progress on the organization's goals. State chapters would advance local agendas and disseminate information about the organization and its goals. Its name was chosen to reflect the site of its first meeting and to be representative of a "mighty current" of change its leaders sought to bring about. Seventeen founders were each appointed as state secretary to individually represent 17 of the states of the union:
  • Massachusetts – CG Morgan
  • Georgia – John Hope
  • Arkansas – FB Coffin
  • Illinois – CE Bentley
  • Kansas – B. S. Smith
  • D.C. – L. M. Henshaw
  • New York – George Frazier Miller
  • Virginia – James Robert Lincoln Diggs
  • Colorado – C. A. Franklin
  • Pennsylvania – G. W. Mitchell
  • Rhode Island – Byron Gunner
  • New Jersey – T. A. Spraggins
  • Maryland – G.R. Waller
  • Iowa – G. H. Woodson
  • Tennessee – Richard Hill
  • Minnesota – F. L. McGhee
  • West Virginia – J. R. Clifford

    Founders

The 29 founders who traveled to the inaugural meeting of the Niagara Movement came from 14 states and became known as "The Original Twenty-nine":
  1. James Robert Lincoln Diggs – College president; pastor; ninth African American to receive a doctorate in the United States
  2. Dr. Henry Lewis "H. L." Bailey – Teacher and medical doctor.
  3. William Justin "W. Justin" Carter, Sr. – Pennsylvania lawyer; civil right activist; scholar; early NAACP member
  4. William Henry "W. H." Scott – Born to slavery, soldier, teacher, bookseller, Baptist pastor, activist, founder of Massachusetts Racial Protective League and the National Independent Political League
  5. Isaac F. "I.F." Bradley, Sr. – Assistant county attorney, Wyandotte County; justice of the peace; judge; publisher and editor of The Wyandotte Echo ; father of Isaac F. Bradley, Jr., who was assistant attorney general for Kansas
  6. Alonzo F. Herndon – Born to slavery; entrepreneur; one of the first African-American millionaires in the United States
  7. William Henry "W. H." Richards – Lawyer and law professor; secured funding from Congress, with William Henry Harrison Hart, for first law school building at Howard University; activist; alderman; mayor;William H. Richards: A remarkable life of a remarkable man, was a biography by Julia B. Nelson, published about 1900
  8. Brown Sylvester "B. S." Smith – Kansas City lawyer and City Councillor, activist. Born to parents who were born into slavery; orphaned young.
  9. Frederick L. McGheeImage:W.E. Burghardt DuBois.JPG|thumb|right|upright|W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903 portrait
  10. William Monroe Trotter
  11. Garnett Russell "G.R." Waller – Shoemaker; pastor
  12. Harvey A. Thompson — H. A. Thompson, Columbus, Ohio native; Fisk University, Le Moyne College and Meharry Medical College alumni; Ninth United States Cavalry ; adjutant and first lieutenant of the Eighth Illinois ; Chicago political and business figure; clerkship at the central police station; married Frances Gowins
  13. William Henry Harrison Hart — Born to a white slave trader; jailed activist; secured funding from Congress, with W. H. Richards, for first law school building at Howard University; law professor; worked for United States Treasury, United States Department of Agriculture; assistant librarian of Congress; first black lawyer appointed as special U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia
  14. Lafayette M. Hershaw
  15. W. E. B. Du Bois – Co-founder of the NAACP
  16. Charles E. Bentley
  17. Clement G. Morgan
  18. Freeman H. M. Murray
  19. J. Max BarberFile:HC Smith.png|thumb|right|H. C. Smith, Men of Mark sketch.
  20. George Frazier Miller — rector of St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, Brooklyn; socialist; civil rights activist
  21. George Henry "G. H." Woodson — Criminal trial attorney, born to newly emancipated slaves; founder and president of both the Iowa Negro Bar Association in 1901 and — subsequent to being denied membership in the American Bar Association — the National Negro Bar Association, in 1925, which became the National Bar Association, of which he also served as president emeritus; President Coolidge appointed Woodson chairman of the first all-Negro commission ever sent overseas, with a mandate to investigate the economic conditions of the Virgin Islands
  22. James S. Madden — Bookkeeper; activist; desegregationist; worked to establish the Chicago branch of the Niagara Movement with Charles E. Bentley; Provident Hospital trustee; assisted in the founding of the Equal Opportunity League
  23. Henry C. Smith – Musician, composer; civil rights activist; Ohio deputy oil inspector; co-founder and editor of The Cleveland Gazette
  24. Emery T. "E.T." Morris — Massachusetts deputy sealer of weights and measures; druggist; rail porter; stationary steam engineer; lay teacher who created extensive antislavery libraries in New England; founder of the Boston branch of the Movement
  25. Richard Hill – Native of Nashville, Tennessee; teacher and city schools supervisor; insurance and real estate entrepreneur; served as NM Secretary for Tennessee; father of civil rights activist and lawyer Richard Hill, Jr.
  26. Robert H. Bonner – Beverly, Massachusetts artist; Yale University alumni; Colored Yale Quartette singer; lawyer; long associated the Trotter family
  27. Byron Gunner – Congregational minister; president of the National Equal Rights League; later a strong ally of William Monroe Trotter; Rhode Island Niagara Movement secretary; father of playwright Mary Frances Gunner
  28. Edwin Bush "E.B." Jourdain — Boston lawyer; hosted "the New Bedford Annex for Boston Radicals"; father of journalist, activist and first black alderman of Evanston, Illinois Edwin B. Jourdain, Jr.
  29. George W. Mitchell – Washington, DC attorney; Howard University Latin and Greek professor; Pennsylvania NM secretary; father of lawyer and real estate investor George Henry Mitchell