Niagara Movement, a short-lived but influential civil rights group primarily organized by W. E. B. DuBois. The founding of the Niagara movement in 1905 marked DuBois's definitive split with Booker T. Washington, principal of the black Tuskegee Institute and considered by many the leader of black America. While Washington advocated gradual economic advancement at the expense of political rights for African Americans, DuBois agitated for total racial equality. After they quarreled repeatedly in 1904, DuBois called like-minded activists to a meeting in Buffalo, New York, to create a new organization dedicated to "Negro freedom and growth" and open dialogue, both withering attacks on Washington.
Thirty black intellectuals and professionals attended the first meeting, which was moved to Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada, because the Buffalo hotel refused to accommodate blacks. A "Declaration of Principles, " composed at the first meeting, affirmed that "the voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust." The Niagara movement was officially incorporated in January 1906. It would survive until 1910, publishing thousands of pamphlets that, along with the tightening Jim Crow regime in the South, undermined Washington's primacy and established DuBois's approach as the dominant civil rights philosophy for decades to come.
The second meeting of Niagarites took place at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Conceived as a celebration of abolitionist and insurrectionary leader John Brown, the event cemented the movement's reputation for radicalism. The 1907 meeting in Boston's Faneuil Hall marked the height of the Niagara movement. Women sat in on sessions for the first time (though some men, led by the out-spoken newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, resisted), and 800 Niagarites representing thirty-four state chapters were in attendance.
Internal strife, however, had started to take its toll on the organization. Trotter and Clement Morgan, both friends of DuBois from Harvard University, fought bitterly in 1907 over the Massachusetts gubernatorial election, and Trotter eventually left the Niagara movement to form his own Negro-American Political League, and later, the National Equal Rights League. The Niagara movement conferences in 1908 and 1909 were poorly attended.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed over the course of 1909 and 1910, never formally absorbed the Niagara movement, but it informally adopted most of its points of view. At first, the NAACP's white founders clashed over how interracial and radical the organization should be, but when DuBois was hired for a salaried position, it was clear that the conservatives had lost. DuBois sent a circular to members of the sagging Niagara movement in 1911, announcing that the annual meeting was cancelled and asking them to join the new organization. Most of them did. In his career as editor of the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, DuBois built on the propaganda work begun by the Niagara movement.
Bibliography
DuBois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life From the Last Decade of its First Century. New York: International Publishers, 1968.
Fox, Stephen R. The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Lewis, David L. W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race. New York: Holt, 1993.
