Niagara Movement emerges; leads to foundation of NAACP (jan 1, 1905 – jan 1, 1909)

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talented tenth: A term used by Harvard-educated sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois for the top 10 percent of educated African Americans, whom he called on to develop new strategies to advocate for civil rights.
National association for the advancement of colored people (Naacp): An organization founded in 1909 by leading African American reformers and white allies as a vehicle for advocating equal rights for African Americans, especially through the courts.

Reeling from disfranchisement and the sanction of racial segregation in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision (see “Consumer Spaces” in Chapter 17), African American leaders faced even more daunting challenges facing their political goals. Given the obvious deterioration of African American rights, a new generation of black leaders proposed bolder approaches than those popularized earlier by Booker T. Washington. Harvard-educated sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois called for a talented tenth of educated blacks to develop new strategies. “The policy of compromise has failed,” declared William Monroe Trotter, pugnacious editor of the Boston Guardian, in a dig at Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise address. “The policy of resistance and aggression deserves a trial.”

In 1905, Du Bois and Trotter called a meeting at Niagara Falls — on the Canadian side, because no hotel on the U.S. side would admit blacks. The resulting Niagara Principles called for full voting rights; an end to segregation; equal treatment in the justice system; and equal opportunity in education, jobs, health care, and military service. These principles, based on an uncompromising demand for full equality, guided the civil rights movement throughout the twentieth century.

In 1908, a bloody race riot broke out in Springfield, Illinois. Appalled by white mob violence in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, New York settlement worker Mary White Ovington called together a group of sympathetic progressives to formulate a response. Their meeting led in 1909 to creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Most leaders of the Niagara Movement soon joined and W. E. B. Du Bois became editor of the NAACP journal, The Crisis. The fledgling group found allies in African American churches and women’s clubs. It also cooperated with the National Urban League (1911), a union of agencies that assisted black migrants in the North. Over the coming decades, these groups grew into a powerful force for racial justice.

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