Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles

Context

There is no question that the racial situation in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century called out for a strong and assertive civil rights organization. Race relations in the country had deteriorated steadily since the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War. By the turn of the century the promise of equality incorporated in the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 had been undone by state action and by the U.S. Supreme Court. A series of state laws and local ordinances segregating blacks and whites received sanction in the Supreme Court, culminating with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. In this case the Supreme Court legitimized “separate but equal facilities” and provided the legal basis for segregation for the next half-century. At the same time, southern states began to place limits on the right of African American to vote, using tactics such as the grandfather clause, white primaries, literacy tests, residency requirements, and poll taxes to prevent blacks from voting. In 1898 the Supreme Court upheld so-called race-neutral restrictions on black suffrage in Williams v. Mississippi. The effect was virtually to eliminate black voting in the states of the South. African Americans did not fare much better in the North, where segregation, if not disenfranchisement, grew increasingly common.

Accompanying segregation and disenfranchisement was a resurgence in racial violence. While the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan had been effectively suppressed by the mid-1870s, the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century experienced an unprecedented wave of racially motivated lynchings and riots. During the first decade of the twentieth century, between fifty-seven and 105 African Americans were lynched by white mobs each year. Lynch mobs targeted blacks almost exclusively, and any pretense of legalism and due process vanished. Furthermore, blacks more and more became victims of the more generalized racial violence of race riots. Race riots during this period typically involved whites rioting against blacks. Some, such as the 1898 riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, were linked to political efforts to stir up racial hostility as part of a campaign to disenfranchise blacks; others, such as the New York race riot of 1900 and the Atlanta race riot of 1906, grew out of resentment of the presence of blacks. To the degree that the rage they unleashed had an objective, it was to destroy the black community and put blacks in “their place.”

As the racial scene deteriorated, African Americans faced a transition in leadership. Frederick Douglass, who had symbolized the African American struggle against slavery and had been an outspoken advocate for equal rights in the post–Civil War period, died in 1895. That same year Booker T. Washington rose to national prominence with his speech at the Cotton States and International  Exposition in Atlanta. The southern-based Washington focused on the economic development of African Americans as the surest road to equality, and while he opposed segregation and black disenfranchisement, he eschewed militant rhetoric and direct confrontation. Washington essentially believed that rational argument and an appeal to southerners' self-interest would defeat prejudice. As time passed and the racial situation worsened, many blacks, especially college-educated northerners, grew impatient with Washington's leadership. By the early twentieth century, such critics as the Boston newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter had become increasingly outspoken about Washington's failures. After 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois emerged as the most respected opponent of Washington and his Tuskegee political machine, the loose coalition of friends and allies through which Washington exercised his political influence on the African American community.