Founding of the NAACP

In June 1905 Du Bois and a rebellious group of blacks met on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and drew up a platform for aggressive action. The group's name came from the location of the first meeting -- the Niagara Movement. The movement never gained a membership of more than 400, and it dissolved at the end of five years.

Niagara Movement

The immediate cause of the founding of the NAACP was the riot on the night of August 14, 1908 that devastated Springfield, Illinois, the town where the Great Emancipator lay entombed. It signaled that the race problem was no longer regional but national (Lewis 1994:387). Whites called a conference for Lincoln's birthday 1909. Some members of the Niagara Movement, most prominently Du Bois, threw in their lot with the biracial NAACP when it began to function in 1910. In that year Du Bois joined the organization's staff as director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis.

1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois

Legal action became the main tactic of the NAACP. In 1915 the NAACP won a Supreme Court suit that invalidated the "grandfather clause" which made it illegal for most Southern blacks to vote. The NAACP's tactic of educational persuasion was based on the premise that white Americans would treat blacks as equals once they overcame their own ignorance. This message was well-suited to the liberal philosophy of the founders (Morris 84:14).

Conservative and Liberal Blacks

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois

Martial (1944:743) wrote that the two traditions of conservatism and liberalism, the same that have always existed among the whites, existed in the black community. The fight between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois established the dominant pattern of political thinking among blacks and whites in the South during the period of Jim Crow dominance. Groups of followers assembled behind these two men and their successors. These two political outlooks continued as dual systems, but it is important to note that neither fundamentally threatened the Southern white system of domination. In the South, the NAACP was always a relatively weak organization. In the Jim Crow era virtually the entire political spectrum in the South basically worked within and accommodated to the racist system.

Vernon Johns

You can bet that Martial never met Vernon Johns. Johns did not approve of either side of this debate and their associated ways of thinking. And in this sense he was a maverick and a rebel. His thoughts were beyond this debate and because he did he inspired those who eventually carried out the destruction of the Southern apartheid system, Martin Luther King Jr. being the foremost of these. Johns had disdain for the conservatives for their accommodation to the system of segregation. But Johns also disliked the NAACP for pretty much the same reason. He felt they were not really fighting hard enough against the segregationist system. Their legal approach was too slow and too ineffective for Johns. He also did not like the NAACP because it was elitist, representing the interests and approaches of the black middle class. Vernon Johns was no gradualist. And therefore he was beyond the political spectrum as it existed in the white and black communities. That is why, as we shall see, he was largely ignored both by conservatives and liberals. (source: Chapter 5 Vernon Johns Attends Virginia Seminary, 1912-1914)

The Niagara Movement: Declaration of Principles, 1905

The following is from Yale: Gilder Lehrman Learning Center for the study of slavery, resistance and abloition

Niagara's Declaration of Principles, 1905

Progress: The members of the conference, known as the Niagara Movement, assembled in annual meeting at Buffalo, July 11th, 12th and 13th, 1905, congratulate the Negro-Americans on certain undoubted evidences of progress in the last decade, particularly the increase of intelligence, the buying of property, the checking of crime, the uplift in home life, the advance in literature and art, and the demonstration of constructive and executive ability in the conduct of great religious, economic and educational institutions.

There were 29 original members of the Niagara Movement who met in Niagara Falls, Canada, in 1905. From there, the circle of black professionals and equal rights activists grew and made a home in New Bedford. (Photo University of Massachusetts at Amherst)

Suffrage [Voting Rights]: At the same time, we believe that this class of American citizens should protest emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their political rights. We believe in manhood suffrage; we believe that no man is so good, intelligent or wealthy as to be entrusted wholly with the welfare of his neighbor.

Civil Liberty: We believe also in protest against the curtailment of our civil rights. All American citizens have the right to equal treatment in places of public entertainment according to their behavior and deserts.

Economic Opportunity: We especially complain against the denial of equal opportunities to us in economic life; in the rural districts of the South this amounts to peonage and virtual slavery; all over the South it tends to crush labor and small business enterprises; and everywhere American prejudice, helped often by iniquitous laws, is making it more difficult for Negro-Americans to earn a decent living.

Education: Common school education should be free to all American children and compulsory. High school training should be adequately provided for all, and college training should be the monopoly of no class or race in any section of our common country. We believe that, in defense of our own institutions, the United States should aid common school education, particularly in the South, and we especially recommend concerted agitation to this end. We urge an increase in public high school facilities in the South, where the Negro-Americans are almost wholly without such provisions. We favor well-equipped trade and technical schools for the training of artisans, and the need of adequate and liberal endowment for a few institutions of higher education must be patent to sincere well-wishers of the race.

Historic Marker at Storer School where the Niagara Movement had its first meeting on American soil.

Courts: We demand upright judges in courts, juries selected without discrimination on account of color and the same measure of punishment and the same efforts at reformation for black as for white offenders. We need orphanages and farm schools for dependent children, juvenile reformatories fox delinquents, and the abolition of the dehumanizing convict-lease system.

Public Opinion: We note with alarm the evident retrogression in this land of sound public opinion on the subject of manhood rights, republican government and human brotherhood, arid we pray God that this nation will not degenerate into a mob of boasters and oppressors, but rather will return to the faith of the fathers, that all men were created free and equal, with certain unalienable rights.

Health: We plead for health—for an opportunity to live in decent houses and localities, for a chance to rear our children in physical and moral cleanliness.

Employers and Labor Unions: We hold up for public execration the conduct of two opposite classes of men: The practice among employers of importing ignorant Negro-American laborers in emergencies, and then affording them neither protection nor permanent employment; and the practice of labor unions in proscribing and boycotting and oppressing thousands of their fellow-toilers, simply because they are black. These methods have accentuated and will accentuate the war of labor and capital, and they are disgraceful to both sides.

Protest: We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.

W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the Niagara Movement

Color-Line: Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice. Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word of protest; but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed.

"Jim Crow" Cars: We protest against the "Jim Crow" car, since its effect is and must be to make us pay first-class fare for third-class accommodations, render us open to insults and discomfort and to crucify wantonly our manhood, womanhood and self-respect.

Soldiers: We regret that this nation has never seen fit adequately to reward the black soldiers who, in its five wars, have defended their country with their blood, and yet have been systematically denied the promotions which their abilities deserve. And we regard as unjust, the exclusion of black boys from the military and naval training schools.

War Amendments: We urge upon Congress the enactment of appropriate legislation for securing the proper enforcement of those articles of freedom, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution of the United States.

Oppression: We repudiate the monstrous doctrine that the oppressor should be the sole authority as to the rights of the oppressed. The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded, struggling up through difficulties and oppression, needs sympathy and receives criticism; needs help and is given hindrance, needs protection and is given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone. This nation will never stand justified before God until these things are changed.

The 29 founding members of the Niagara Movement

The Church: Especially are we surprised and astonished at the recent attitude of the church of Christ—of an increase of a desire to bow to racial prejudice, to narrow the bounds of human brotherhood, and to segregate black men to some outer sanctuary. This is wrong, unchristian and disgraceful to the twentieth century civilization.

Agitation: Of the above grievances we do not hesitate to complain, and to complain loudly and insistently. To ignore, overlook, or apologize for these wrongs is to prove ourselves unworthy of freedom. Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty, and toward this goal the Niagara Movement has started and asks the cooperation of all men of all races.

Help: At the same time we want to acknowledge with deep thankfulness the help of our fellowmen from the Abolitionist down to those who today still stand for equal opportunity and who have given and still give of their wealth and of their poverty for our advancement.

Duties: And while we are demanding, and ought to demand, and will continue to demand the rights enumerated above, God forbid that we should ever forget to urge corresponding duties upon our people:

• The duty to vote.
• The duty to respect the rights of others.
• The duty to work.
• The duty to obey the laws.
• The duty to be clean and orderly.
• The duty to send our children to school.
• The duty to respect ourselves, even as we respect others.

This statement, complaint and prayer we submit to the American people, and Almighty God.

(source: Yale: Gilder Lehrman Learning Center for the study of slavery, resistance and abloition)