The Niagara Movement, Nineteen-oh-Five

In the summer of nineteen-oh-five, W.E.B. Du Bois organized a meeting of Black intellectuals, lawyers, clergy, and activists with a specific purpose: to directly challenge the political strategy of Booker T. Washington. Washington, the most prominent Black leader in America at the time, had counseled patience, vocational education, economic self-improvement, and the deferral of civil and political rights. His critics called the strategy the Atlanta Compromise, and they found it intolerable.

Du Bois had arranged for the conference to be held in Buffalo, with help from Mary Burnett Talbert, an educator and activist who lived in Buffalo. But the meeting was moved at the last minute across the border to the Erie Beach Hotel in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. A popular story says Buffalo hotels refused Black guests, though that account is unproven.

Twenty-nine men attended. They produced a declaration demanding full civil rights, unrestricted voting rights, free speech, access to higher education, and an end to racial discrimination in every public institution. The organization they founded took its name from the falls visible from their meeting place across the border: the Niagara Movement.

By September of nineteen-oh-five, the Niagara Movement had established chapters in twenty-one states, and it ended the year with about one hundred seventy members. It lasted only four years as an independent organization before dissolving into the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in nineteen-oh-nine. The NAACP has continued without interruption.

Buffalo was the planned site of the organizing meeting. The connection is imprecise in many popular accounts, which credit only Niagara Falls. The meeting was planned for Buffalo. Buffalo was where it was planned, and Fort Erie is where it happened.