Niagara Movement

Significance: The Niagara Movement, a progenitor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was founded on July 11, 1905, and helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.

In the early years of the twentieth century, two major approaches to achieving African American progress were separated by their differing philosophies: Booker T. Washington was a pragmatist who acknowledged current policies toward blacks and wanted to make the lives of African Americans as easy as possible within that framework. Washington held that “it is important and right that all privileges of law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.” He assumed that as African Americans became productive workers who were not troublemakers, they would be seen as valuable assets to US society. Then they would slowly but surely move up the economic and political ladder.

Beginnings

The leaders of what came to be known as the Niagara Movement, by contrast, asserted that Washington’s programs would keep African Americans at the bottom of the political, economic, and social ladder. One of the Niagara Movement’s major leaders was W. E. B. Du Bois, a professor at Atlanta University at the beginning of the movement. Du Bois maintained that it was important for African Americans to press for the immediate implementation of their civil rights: “We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now. . . . We want the Constitution of the country enforced. . . . We want our children educated. . . . And we shall win!” The leaders of the Niagara Movement were convinced that as long as African Americans were not protected by law, economic and social advances would never come. They believed that the structures of United States society were developed in such a way that, without the force of law, other advances would never occur. These two different views of how to achieve progress for African Americans not only separated Washington and Du Bois throughout their lives but would remain at the heart of discord over how best to achieve freedom and progress for African Americans in the United States.

The Niagara Movement was formed on July 11, 1905, when twenty-nine radical African American intellectuals, headed by Du Bois, met at Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada. (Even though some organizational activities were held in Buffalo, New York, on the other side of the US-Canadian border, most meetings were held in Canada because of the difficulty of finding places in the United States that would accommodate African Americans.) On nearly every issue, the Niagara Movement stood in direct contrast to Washington’s approach. In sharp language, in a policy statement entitled the Negro Declaration of Independence, movement leaders placed full responsibility for the race problem on whites, denouncing the inequities of segregation and disfranchisement laws; they maintained that economic progress was not possible in a democratic society without the protection afforded by the ballot; and they insisted, above all, that African Americans could gain their rights only by agitation. Members of the Niagara Movement spoke out against an accommodationist approach at a time when almost all white and African American leaders believed that such policies were critical if blacks were to achieve equality in US society and politics.

About five years after it had been established, the Niagara Movement had approximately four hundred members. Most were Northern, urban, upper-class college graduates. The movement never developed the wide following it wanted. Some assert that the movement did not reach a broad enough spectrum in the African American community, let alone create an appeal to the broader society of which it was part. At first women were excluded from the Niagara Movement, both as members and as a focus of emancipation. Some of the movement’s organizers reasoned that fighting for women’s rights along with rights for African American males would result in defeat of the movement’s policies and goals. Du Bois, however, argued that African American civil rights would not be complete without women as well as men tasting the fruits of freedom. He argued that to obtain male suffrage on the backs of women was immoral and not in keeping with the solidarity that African Americans must maintain in the face of the hostility of the dominant white society. Du Bois’s position finally prevailed.

The NAACP

During its existence, the Niagara Movement held conferences in 1906, at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; in 1907, at Boston, Massachusetts; and in 1908, at Oberlin, Ohio. Civil rights protests in cities across the nation were organized by the Niagara Movement, which gained a reputation for demanding recognition of the equality of all human beings through social protest and demonstrations. In the wake of a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, the movement began to dissolve as members turned their attention to a new organization. On February 12, 1909, the ideas on which the Niagara Movement was founded were absorbed into the framework of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which not only developed a wider following but also addressed the broader issues of equality and civil rights that the Niagara Movement was not able to address effectively. Important members of the Niagara Movement, such as Du Bois, became instrumental in the NAACP as well. Du Bois, however, decided that even the NAACP was not forceful enough in addressing issues such as lynching, rape, and voting rights. He would end his life in exile in Africa.

Although the Niagara Movement survived only five years—formally disbanding in 1910—it had served as the foundation upon which later movements were built. It can be seen as both a negative reaction to Washington’s accommodationist approach to African American equality and the progenitor of such later groups as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Black Panthers.

Bibliography

Burns, W. Haywood. The Voices of Negro Protest in America. Westport: Greenwood, 1980. Print.

Christensen, Stephanie. "Niagara Movement (1905–1909)." BlackPast.org. BlackPast.org, 2015. Web. 14 May. 2015.

Jones, Angela. African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. Print.

Niagara Movement: Black Protest Reborn. Washington, DC: Assn. for the Study of African-American Life and History, 2005. Print.

Wormser, Richard. "Niagara Movement (1905–10)." The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. WGBH, PBS, 2002. Web. 14 May. 2015.