Niagara Movement

THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT was a social activism group formally organized on January 31, 1906, by the African American social reformer W.E.B. Du Bois. It began with a clandestine gathering in 1905 of 29 black men who wanted to form an organization that advocated for rights of black Americans. Since the group met on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, they named the movement after the venue of the first meeting. The principles of the movement as provided in a declaration by Du Bois, coauthor William Monroe Trotter, and the other the members of the organization included a call for progressive advancement, political and civil rights, economic freedom, educational opportunity, egalitarian working conditions, social justice, healthy living conditions, solidarity, and, generally, an end to the oppression of black people. These principles were to be advanced through suffrage, free expression and criticism, and valiant and wise organizational leadership.

The means of achieving the organizational goals involved overt vocal and ideological opposition to any type of prejudicial, discriminatory, or oppressive practices. The declaration of the movement's principles left no doubt that the members were to “agitate” the powers that be in order to force the necessary changes for a totally egalitarian society. In this sense the movement was “radical,” however, the group did not advocate violence as an acceptable means of bringing about this change.

After the formal organization of the group in 1906, the second meeting of the Niagara Movement took place that year overtly at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, on the site of John Brown's raid. This second conference included a dawn pilgrimage and a review of the organization's resolutions, which were delivered with a more forceful tone. The group met in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1907 and in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1908. Du Bois was severely criticized in the media for his involvement with this group, which was seen by many whites as being radical and threatening. During the early years of the movement, he began putting his thoughts in a small weekly magazine called The Moon, which would later become The Horizon. In 1910, this publication became the well-read periodical The Crisis.

The impetus of the group's formation had begun years earlier when the Boston Guardian journal editor William Monroe Trotter and a colleague heckled Booker T. Washington at one of Washington's presentations at a church. Washington, who was at that time America's highly respected and probably most famous black leader, was reportedly responsible for Trotter's incarceration. Du Bois, who was already critical of Washington's attempts at racial equality and what he saw as the unacceptable pacification of powerful white leaders, became infuriated when Trotter became jailed due to the disturbance (Du Bois himself was not present at the incident). The friction between Du Bois and his supporters and Washington and his supporters, a group Du Bois termed the “Tuskegee Machine,” became legendary as the two camps verbally battled in an effort to sway the cultural ethos of race relations in America. For these reasons, Du Bois started the organization in an effort to more forcefully pursue racial equality.

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