The Niagara Movement: The Early Battle for Civil Rights

male announcer: The following program contains mature content, including depictions of graphic violence, discussion of suicide, and the use of a racial epithet in historical context.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Debra Wilson: The early 20th century was a time of racial violence and terror.

Aldon Morris: Black communities being burned down.

Black people being shot in the streets, women, children.

We can no longer tolerate this.

And it is that kind of resistance and anger that gives rise to the Niagara Movement.

Debra: July 1905, 29 African-American men travel to Niagara Falls.

They were creating an organization to fight racism.

Amilcar Shabazz: These folks who are coming in on that stream to change America and to change the world.

From the Old Testament, let justice roll down like cascades of water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Angela Jones: The story of the Niagara Movement is the story of three African-American leaders with very different political philosophies.

Debra: Two of the three were the heart and soul of the movement: W.E.B Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter.

male: W.E.B Du Bois is the most important African-American intellectual and civil rights activist in American history.

William Monroe Trotter was the most fiery, passionate, and uncompromising fighter for African-American civil rights in the early 20th century.

Debra: Du Bois and Trotter wanted to confront racial injustice head-on; but the most powerful African American in the country preached accommodation, not confrontation.

Amilcar: Booker T. Washington becomes black America's president.

From about 1895 or so, he is it.

He's the strong man.

He's the headman.

He's the boss.

Aldon: He tells white people, "We don't need to be equal to you socially."

The Niagara Movement is the notion that we are breaking away from Booker T. Washington's politics.

Chad Williams: You cannot talk about the struggle for civil rights in American history without acknowledging the Niagara Movement.

Even though it lasted only a few short years, it left an incredibly powerful legacy and an imprint on the way that we think about civil rights struggle today.

Aldon: So what's at stake is what kind of country is the United States going to be.

Is it going to be a democracy or is it going to be a country in which the newly-emancipated black people are still going to be second-class citizens and slaves?

female announcer: This program has been made possible by a major grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation, a private Western New York foundation dedicated to enhancing the economic vitality and quality of life for the Buffalo Niagara region through grant making and network building; with additional support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people; Community Foundation of Tampa Bay Incorporated in memory of Susan Howarth; and by Visit Buffalo Niagara, whose mission is to transform our community by inspiring visitors and locals to discover Buffalo.

Debra: The Niagara Movement was born at a moment when America was marching confidently into the future.

The dawn of the 20th century seemed a time of national optimism and sweeping progress.

male: It was an era of stark contradiction and hypocrisy.

While you have Andrew Carnegie and other industrialists making millions and millions of dollars, vast sums of wealth never seen before, African Americans are cast back into a state of near slavery-like conditions.

Through racial violence, the idea of American progress itself was not seen by the overwhelming majority of African Americans.

Debra: In the Reconstruction era after the civil war many African Americans in the south had voted and many were elected to political office, but in the 1870s and 1880s whites pushed through a rash of sweeping oppressive laws.

The Jim Crow era had begun.

male: Blacks lose the right to vote.

Segregation goes from just being a custom to being the law.

Aldon: The Jim Crow system told them where they could go to the washroom and where they could not go.

They told them where they could sit, where they could travel, and so on and so forth.

So it was a kind of real personal domination that was full of humiliation, and the lynchpin of the terror to keep black people in place was lynching.

Chad: By the turn of the 20th century, lynching had become increasingly spectacular and carnivalesque in nature.

Advertised in advance, literally hundreds, sometimes thousands of people attending these festivals of violence in which African Americans were burned, mutilated, and tortured as a form of entertainment.

Lynching was a form of terror that scarred the collective psyches of African Americans.

Debra: In this time of repression, humiliation, and terror, the Niagara Movement dared to demand nothing less than full equality.

male: Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles: "We refuse to allow the impression that the Negro American ascends to inferiority is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.

Our voice of protest must never cease so long as America is unjust."

Chad: The Niagara Movement was one of the first organizations, one of the first movements that was explicitly centered around an unequivocal demand for African-American civil rights and full inclusion into the American body politic.

Debra: W.E.B.

Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter hoped to unleash a mighty current of protest, but the foremost African-American leader saw things very differently and for a very good reason.

Aldon: Booker T. Washington knows the terrorism of the south.

He knows that if you got out of line in any kind of way you're going to be lynched.

Chad: Booker T. Washington was a product of the south.

He was born a slave in 1856, was raised in slavery in Virginia.

He experienced struggling and clawing and scrapping to become educated.

He realized within his bones what it took to survive in the south.

He understood the language, the culture, the customs, the rules of the south in a way that W.E.B Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter did not.

Debra: At 16 Booker T. Washington went to Hampton Institute, an agricultural and industrial school for newly-freed black men.

Aldon: He's gone to Hampton.

He's learned the Hampton way.

Black people don't need a college education, liberal arts education.

They need to learn how to work with their hands.

They need to know how to get along with white people and go along and obey white people.

Ray Smock: If you learn how to read and write, if you've got a trade, if you could make something of yourself, that that was the road to freedom.

Debra: In 1881 the 25-year-old Booker T. Washington was named principal of a new school, Tuskegee Institute in East Alabama.

Kenneth Hamilton: East Alabama--Tuskegee.

Old black belt plantation country.

The soil was no longer fertile.

Black people had suffered racial violence.

Tuskegee had no railroad.

You had to get off at a town that was down the road from Tuskegee and take a buggy or wagon into Tuskegee.

Ray: Booker T. went down there.

There was no school.

There was a chicken house, a hen house, a ramshackle barn.

They had the grounds.

They had the place to build a school; but Washington had to build the school himself basically, and the way he did that was he gathered students together and they started building it brick by brick.

This became the hallmark of Tuskegee Institute, that it was built by the students.

They learned brick-making while they were building, they learned carpentry while they were building, and they learned trades.

All the people who came down to see Tuskegee were amazed.

April England Albright: Booker T. Washington believed in the power, in the independence and ingenuity of black people and created an institution that to this day stands and continues to educate and produce black educators and scientists and engineers.

My father and my mother and my son were graduates of Tuskegee Institution that was created by Brother Booker T. Washington.

Stephen Fox: Washington first comes to public attention when he gives a speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895.

Amilcar: This is perhaps the first time in the south that you would have on the speaker dais with white people a person of African descent.

And he gets his moment to speak.

Stephen: He had a way of coming out on the stage and putting his hands in his pockets and just standing there motionless and quiet for a while, and this had a way of quieting the audience.

And once he had them in his hand, he held them in his hand.

He was a brilliant orator.

Chad: He offered a solution to one of the most vexing problems of the day, the so-called race question or the Negro problem.

Booker T. Washington: "The masses of us are to live by the production of our hands.

We shall prosper as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor.

It is at the bottom of life we should begin and not the top."

Booker T. Washington.

Kenneth: What really Washington wanted was financial well-being for black people.

He was promoting his movement in a way that was not offensive to white people.

Aldon: He's trying to figure out a way, "How do we survive and yet make progress.

Let's try to better ourselves materially, economically.

Let's prove to the white man that we are of value and that we're willing to work hard."

Chad: African Americans would stay in their place, that they would be content with their status as workers and not challenge the racial status quo.

Aldon: When white people and white leaders hear that, they are like, "Oh my God, that's it."

You had black people and white people crying when they heard him speak.

Debra: His speech would be called the "Atlanta Compromise."

Amilcar: By the time the speech ends, folks are described in the press accounts as jumping up on tables, you know, hurrah.

Stephen: The "Atlanta Compromise," it's one of the most significant speeches in black history because it makes Booker the leader of his race.

Aldon: It just catapulted him into stardom.

That is why the money is going to flow to him.

So he builds this powerful organization.

He's got the machinery.

He's got the white money.

You know, he's got it all and so he becomes the wizard of Tuskegee.

Chad: Washington did things that no African American had been able to do in the history of the United States, navigating his way through the complexities of the color line and white supremacy in the south but more importantly to develop a power base which he could lead and to speak as the unquestioned voice of the Negro.

Debra: Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech was soon reflected in a landmark judicial decision.

Amilcar: The Plessy v. Ferguson decision was a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States of America that effectively upheld that white supremacy is legal.

So effectively it allows for there to be two nations in this country.

Aldon: Black people would have separate facilities but they would be equal to white facilities, but of course there was never going to be any possibility that black facility schools and so on were going to be separate but equal.

Debra: The Plessy decision institutionalized racial inequality in America.

Booker T. Washington accepted that inequality, a stance that would eventually trigger the birth of the Niagara Movement.

But in the late 1890s, every prominent African-American leader of the day applauded his compromise and that included a brilliant young sociology professor 27 years old and fresh out of Harvard, W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Chad: W.E.B.

Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in the Berkshire Hills.

He was one of just a small handful of black people in his town.

He experienced a type of freedom that many black people particularly those in the south knew nothing of.

He was, however, not immune to racism.

As a young schoolboy, he became acutely aware of his blackness.

W.E.B Du Bois: "I, as a Negro in this school, seem to be looked upon as unusual by everybody.

I very early got the idea that what I was going to do was to prove that Negroes were just like other people."

Aldon: Du Bois, one of the most extraordinary intellectuals that the United States has ever produced.

He earns a bachelor's from Fisk University, one of the top historically black colleges at the time.

Then he goes to Harvard and he earns a second bachelor's, and then he earns a master's degree from Harvard.

Debra: In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University.

Ray: The difference between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.

Du Bois is the difference between day and night.

Booker T. Washington was a political boss.

Du Bois is an intellectual--an academic intellectual, a man of passion, a man of poetry, a man of literature.

Stephen: In the late 1890s, he pretty much endorses Washington's program and at times blames black people for their predicament.

Du Bois: "The American Negro must become self-supporting, a source of strength and power instead of a menace and a burden to the nation."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Debra: But in April 1899, a horrific event in Georgia changed everything for W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Chad: A black man named Sam Hose was accused of killing his employer.

Stephen: He was in jail waiting execution and a mob just came along, stole him from the jail.

Chad: Sam Hose was lynched.

Stephen: They tortured him.

They burned him alive.

They took pieces of his body and displayed them in stores for sale as souvenirs.

Chad: W.E.B.

Du Bois heard about this lynching.

He heard that the charred knuckles of Sam Hose were on display in a grocery store window.

Whitney Battle-Baptiste: Du Bois says that he was stopped dead in his tracks.

Chad: As he recalled later, a red ray struck him and he realized that one cannot be a cool, calm, detached scientist while African Americans, while Negroes were being burned, starved, and mutilated.

Whitney: He realized at that time that data was not enough, sociology was not enough.

And it was at that moment where he decided that in addition to the data he was thinking critically about not just uplift of the race but liberation, but freedom from danger.

Du Bois: "I changed from studying the Negro problem to letting people know just what the colored people were suffering."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Aldon: That is the spirit then that is going to lead Du Bois to be an organizer of the Niagara Movement.

He was one of the greatest scholars that America has produced, but he's also one of the greatest activists that America has ever produced.

Debra: In 1900, Du Bois took the first step in a journey toward radical protest.

He set out to challenge the racist stereotypes of American culture.

Angela: We see in exhibitions this pervasive cultural imagery that continually portrays African Americans as uncivilized, as backwards, as savages; and this cultural imagery continues to reinforce white supremacist logics about supposed African-American inferiority.

Debra: In 1901, the city of Buffalo, New York hosted an enormous world's fair, the Pan-American Exposition.

Several exhibits depicted black people.

Barbara A.

Seals Nevergold: The old plantation representing a time when African Americans were enslaved and darkest Africa representing African Americans as savages.

African Americans in Buffalo, particularly a group of African-American women, were in opposition to the old plantation and darkest Africa exhibit.

These women wanted to advocate for a picture, a portrait, if you would, of African Americans as accomplished contributing individuals.

They wanted to have the Negro exhibit at the Pan Am created by W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Chad: Du Bois put together a remarkable series of displays, photographs refuting racist caricatures of black people as savages, as animalistic-like creatures; instead showing black people fully dressed in Victorian-era clothing, looking dignified and respectable.

He also put together an incredible series of drafts and charts filled with striking colorful images which demonstrated the ways in which African Americans had achieved unprecedented levels of education, wealth, other forms of progress since emancipation.

This was part of Du Bois' approach to confronting the characteristics of African Americans as somehow uncivilized, as somehow unworthy of civil rights.

Debra: Du Bois had now begun to question Booker T. Washington's policy of accommodation.

Aldon: You must understand the tremendous power of Booker T. Washington.

For W.E.B.

Du Bois to come out against the politics of Booker T. Washington was not something for the faint-hearted.

Debra: The careful Du Bois had no intention of alienating the most powerful black person in America, but one young newspaper editor in Boston had no such qualms.

Chad: William Monroe Trotter was fiery, uncompromising, and blistering when it came to his criticisms of Booker T. Washington and his politics of compromise.

Kerri Greenidge: William Monroe Trotter grew up with all the benefits of sort of an upper middle-class life.

Stephen: This boy Monroe Trotter was self-contained and self-motivated.

He was headed somewhere it was obvious.

At his school, his Hyde Park High School, he's the only black guy.

He's the president of the class.

Kerri: He eventually entered Harvard University where he excelled in his studies.

He never ranked below third in his class, graduated in 1895.

Stephen: Du Bois and Trotter have grown up in similar circumstances in relatively free areas, white neighborhoods of Massachusetts; and they both go to Harvard.

They're among the few blacks walking across the Harvard yard.

Debra: By the turn of the century, both Trotter and Du Bois became members of a civil rights group called the Afro-American Council.

Shawn Alexander: But they feel that the Afro-American Council is becoming conservative.

They believe that Booker T. Washington is controlling the organization and keeping the radical elements at bay.

Debra: In the fall of 1901, the 29-year-old Monroe Trotter co-founded the Guardian newspaper.

Kerri: And that newspaper became the heartbeat and conscious of black America.

William Monroe Trotter: "The Guardian makes itself responsible for our collective deliverance.

None are free unless all are free."

William Monroe Trotter.

Stephen: In 1901 when the Boston Guardian gets started, the medium for black people is these weekly newspapers all around the country.

Kerri: Nearly every community across the country that had a sizable black population had some form of newspaper.

Chad: The black press has always played a very important role serving as a voice of protest.

Debra: But by 1901 most of the black newspapers in America voiced the opinion of one man and one man only.

Aldon: Booker T. Washington understood the power of the black press.

So he immediately moves to get control of the black press.

Kerri: Washington would literally go in and replace the newspaper staff and pay them out of his own money to publish what he wanted.

That was the way that he controlled public dissent.

Shawn: Booker T. Washington controls the message.

When Trotter creates his Boston Guardian, he takes great offense to this and he wants to use the Guardian as a space where he can challenge Booker T. Washington.

Ray: Trotter lambasted Booker T. Washington in his newspaper from day one.

Debra: Trotter's paper called Washington the Benedict Arnold of the Negro race, the great traitor, the great divider, the miserable toad, the imperial Caesar.

Washington was a hypocrite who turns everything into cash for himself.

Trotter's attack was not just personal.

He was protesting the central idea of white supremacy.

Four years before the Niagara Movement, the war of ideas had begun.

Aldon: Trotter never agreed with Booker T. Washington at all.

He was always a critic.

He was always someone who felt that the accommodationist politics of Booker T. Washington was not the way to go.

William: "Booker T. Washington, the Moses of his race, advocates submission to Jim Crowism."

William Monroe Trotter.

Stephen: Washington did not allow anyone to criticize his leadership and anybody who dared to do that was going to get squashed, and Washington tried in various ways to squash Trotter.

Kerri: Washington tried to sue the Guardian multiple times for libel.

Trotter could hire his own attorneys, very, very good attorneys, to defend him in court and he could win.

William: "We will not apologize, and we will not retreat.

We will be satisfied with nothing less than our full citizenship rights."

William Monroe Trotter.

Kerri: "The questions we're asking should not be what is wrong with black people," Trotter would say.

"What it should be is what's wrong with the systems that have created the conditions in which black people live."

Debra: In the summer of 1903, Trotter went from bristling newspaper editorials to direct confrontation.

male: Booker T. Washington comes to the city of Boston.

Kerri: When Washington shows up for his meeting at the Columbus Avenue AME church, Trotter shows up with his supporters.

Shawn: And they begin to shout down Booker T. Washington.

Kerri: Trotter supporters throw cayenne pepper on the dais.

Shawn: People start sneezing.

Kerri: Coughing.

male: William Monroe Trotter stood on the pews shouting at Booker T. Washington.

Kerri: The church is exploding into arguments.

male: Jeers, hisses.

Stephen: Yelling back and forth.

male: Fist fights broke out.

male: It becomes a malay.

male: The cops arrive.

Shawn: William Monroe Trotter's sister in the bedlam even stabs a police officer with a hairpin.

Kerri: She is taken away.

Chad: William Monroe Trotter is ultimately arrested, sentenced to 30 days in jail, and the Boston riot symbolizes the vociferous opposition to Booker T. Washington that existed certainly in Boston but was beginning to spread throughout the country as well.

Booker: "You will be glad to know that Trotter was taken out of the church in handcuffs yelling like a baby.

They are to be tried in court tomorrow."

Booker T. Washington.

Debra: The leadership of black America was now openly divided, but W.E.B.

Du Bois did not immediately take sides.

Du Bois: "While I condemn the disturbance in Boston, I nevertheless admire Mr. Trotter as a man and agree with him in his main contentions."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Debra: Then Washington made a critical mistake.

He got Trotter sent to jail.

Kami Fletcher: And that's really the last straw for Du Bois.

Chad: Du Bois had to make a choice after that.

He could no longer straddle the fence.

Du Bois: "When Trotter went to jail, my indignation overflowed.

I did not always agree with Trotter then or later, but he was an honest, brilliant man and to treat as a crime that which was at worst mistaken judgment was an outrage."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Angela: In this moment, it was kind of very clear to Du Bois that there was going to be no working with Washington.

Debra: Earlier that year, Du Bois had announced his public break from Washington in his landmark book "The Souls of Black Folk."

Du Bois: "Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up three things.

First, political power.

Second, insistence on civil rights.

Third, higher education.

But the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Aldon: He had come to the conclusion similar to Monroe Trotter that Booker T. Washington's brand of accommodationism would not work, and he would speak out.

Kami: Yo, how do you have this person speaking for us who is literally saying stay in servitude?

How is that going to lead anybody anywhere?

Angela: For a lot of folks like Du Bois and Trotter and members of the Niagara Movement he was a sellout to a white political agenda, but in some ways we miss the nuance, I think, of this story when we only focus on those elements of Washington's legacy.

This is somebody who provided hope and affirmation, especially to folks in the south.

Debra: But Trotter and Du Bois could not accept Washington's accommodation.

They became allies to confront injustice rather than find a way to live with it.

Aldon: What was going on then is that you have the emergence of two wings of black politics.

They decide the moment has come that we are going to have to organize a different kind of approach: the protest approach, the militant approach.

Shawn: That moment, that flash in Boston actually creates the spark that will lead to the creation of the Niagara Movement.

Du Bois: "I sent out from Atlanta in June 1905 a call to a few selected persons for organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth.

I proposed a conference during that summer."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Debra: The meeting place was to be Buffalo, New York, not far from Niagara Falls.

Aldon: The location of the Niagara Movement was not chosen in a random sense.

Barbara: Buffalo was a lively city at the turn of the century, and we had broad streets that were tree-lined.

We were close to Niagara Falls and so we were a tourist center.

Stephen: Buffalo had been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

It's a very symbolic place for black people.

Du Bois: "I went to Buffalo and hired a little hotel on the Canada side of the river at Fort Erie and waited for the men to attend the meeting.

Twenty-nine men representing fourteen states came."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Stephen: They are trying to form an organization to counter the enormous power and influence of Booker T. Washington, and it's a brave thing to do because Washington's critics could expect to be hounded and pounced on and maybe lose their jobs or careers just because they spoke up against Booker T. So it's an act of bravery.

male: This great photograph of the original leaders of the Niagara Movement sitting in front of the Niagara Falls with this water coming down.

The fall itself is a sense of power.

Debra: Together, Du Bois and Trotter wrote out the new organization's manifesto, the Declaration of Principles.

Ray: The Niagara Movement was saying nothing more than was said in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

Shawn: The right to citizenship, the right to vote, the right to be treated as American citizens.

Debra: The new movement would fight inequality, not accept it.

Their tactic would not be accommodation but confrontation.

Kami: "We're not going to take this.

We are going to fight this system."

Angela: W.E.B Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and ultimately the activists of the Niagara Movement were calling for full civil rights political participation.

Ray: Du Bois and Trotter spelled out in more simplest direct terms that the right to vote and racial equality were the essential things that were missing in American culture, not just things that African Americans needed but that the whole country needed to be free.

Aldon: What the Niagara Movement does is that it says we are full human beings, that we will never cease protesting to achieve full social equality.

Debra: The Niagara Movement was launching an ideological struggle, and the target of its attack was the idea of accommodation promoted by Booker T. Washington.

Aldon: Washington did not tolerate rivals.

Angela: Washington did not hide his efforts nor his desires to stop and end the Niagara Movement.

Ray: He sent spies to infiltrate the organization.

There was 29 people that came to that first Niagara meeting.

A couple of them were basically there watching things for Booker T. Washington.

Aldon: He puts his forces into operation.

"Let's destroy this thing."

He's got control of most of the black press and so then the Niagara Movement is going to have this great problem of trying to get their message out to the masses of people.

Debra: The historic founding of the Niagara Movement was scarcely mentioned in the black press.

This created a problem for the organization would accept only black members.

Angela: The Niagara Movement was an all-black organization, and that was strategic and intentional.

Having an integrated organization might dilute in some ways their messaging, their overall vision and goals.

Debra: It would be a crucial choice.

In the end some saw it as a double-edged sword, a step toward independence that also became a crippling economic limitation.

Chad: The Niagara Movement for all of its vision and brilliance was flawed in a number of ways.

Aldon: The Niagara Movement, they were black elites.

They were educated.

They were professionals.

They didn't really know how to relate to the masses.

And so the Niagara Movement in many ways was this echo chamber of elite black people talking to each other.

Debra: The movement was all educated, all black; and it was also all male.

Kerri: In 1905 when the organization first formed, they did not allow women to become members.

This was actually the source of a lot of strife and a lot of internal debate.

Du Bois on the one hand advocated for full civil rights for women, for suffrage for women, and actively wanted women to join and become members of the Niagara Movement.

It was Trotter who would say that women could not participate in the Niagara Movement.

He believed that black men had to take the leadership.

Aldon: That was one of the weaknesses of the Niagara Movement.

If you're going to do anything in the black community, you better involve the women because the women are organizers.

They're intellectuals.

They're hard workers.

Kami: What struck me about the Niagara Movement was that the National Association of Colored Women who at the time of their founding had 15,000 members--how do you leave this out of what is supposed to be such a pivotal movement?

Debra: In its first year, the movement grew.

Its members created chapters in 34 states.

They distributed over 10,000 pamphlets, tracks, and circulars.

They agitated against a segregated exposition in Jamestown, Virginia, bringing segregation into the public eye.

Debra: In August 1906, the Niagara Movement held a second annual meeting at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

"The outlook for vigorous growth and work is excellent," Du Bois claimed.

He pushed the movement to add female members.

Angela: There's a radical shift and the majority of the membership is calling for the inclusion of women in the movement.

Unfortunately, Trotter was not.

And kind of bitterly even to the end of those debates was still digging his heels in that women did not belong in this movement.

William: "Women follow, never lead in civilization.

Man is responsible for her elevation or degradation in every sense."

William Monroe Trotter.

Angela: Trotter was very, very vocal about this, but Trotter--this was not a battle that Trotter won, and in 1906 women were allowed to become formal members.

Debra: That same year the movement made a fateful decision.

It would support a lawsuit involving a woman named Barbara Pope.

Angela: In 1906 Barbara Pope was boarding a train in D.C. to Virginia.

Aldon: She took a seat at the front of the train, and they came to her--a black woman, they came to her and said, "No, you cannot sit here."

Ann Chinn: She is required to go to the rear where all colored or people of color would be assigned, and she refused and she is arrested.

Barbara very much was doing this on her own and then she approached the Niagara Movement.

Aldon: The Niagara Movement took her case to the courts, declaring that it was unconstitutional for her to have to sit at the back of the train.

Jennifer Harris: And the judge says that; yes, Pope is right, you know, that the railway shouldn't have done this.

This was against the law.

Debra: It was a big win for the Niagara Movement and for civil rights but not for Barbara Pope.

Ann: She's awarded a penny in damages.

The indignity-- Jennifer: It says that everything she's gone through is for nothing.

It did not recognize her as a lady, and it did not recognize her rights.

The consequences for her were that her career was over, her reputation was damaged, and it led to so much pressure on her.

Ann: This is a war.

This breaking down of white supremacy and segregation, it takes its toll and it takes its toll on all the individuals who are fighting that, who are challenging all that injustice.

And it took its toll on Barbara, I would say.

Jennifer: She began to suffer.

She can't sleep.

She's exhausted.

She describes her brain as being on fire, and she says her body is worn out.

Ann: You know, one day, I guess, she decides it's just easier to just end it.

She hanged herself, and it's in a public park where her body is found hanging from a tree.

Aldon: Barbara Pope does not go down in history like Rosa Parks.

Angela: Rosa Parks, this is a name that I think almost everybody in the US knows.

What we don't know is that Rosa Parks is part of a very long history.

Debra: For the Niagara Movement, victory in the Barbara Pope case came at great cost, literally.

Angela: In that year, they had only taken in somewhere around $800 in membership dues but spent nearly all of that money on that one case.

That one effort, that one legal action almost bankrupted the organization.

Debra: But the financial disaster also brought a decisive revelation for the movement.

Angela: The Niagara Movement came to see how powerful the courts could be in this legal strategy.

That laid the groundwork for Brown v. the Board of Education, right, and many of the legal successes that we'd come to see in the mid-20th century.

Aldon: A major tactic of black politics and black protest is going to be to fight through the courts, to use the law to overthrow racism and Jim Crow.

Debra: The Niagara Movement had won a crucial legal battle against racial injustice, but events in Atlanta, Georgia soon showed that life outside the courtroom was unchanged and terrifying.

Stephen: Atlanta was the new south.

Atlanta was supposed to be the enlightened, new, modern part of the south.

Kenneth: Black people were making not only educational progress but also financial progress.

I mean, people had these big, beautiful, stately houses in urban and other areas of Atlanta.

Debra: But on the night of September 22nd, 1906, racial violence broke out in Atlanta.

Chad: Rumors were spread that African Americans had assaulted a number of white women.

Ray: A major riot broke out.

It turned out to be very bad.

A number of people were killed, lots of houses were burned.

Chad: Mobs pulling innocent black people off of street cars, burning homes, lynching.

Stephen: White mobs just rampaged through black neighborhoods killing anyone they can, hanging them, shooting them.

No one is ever punished.

Chad: The September 1906 Atlanta riot was one of the most horrific moments of racial violence in American history, but it was also a critical turning point in the struggle for African-American civil rights.

The Atlanta riot taking place in the symbol of the new south was a stark reminder that progress as it was being espoused by southern progressives did not apply for African Americans; and it was also a wakeup call for many African Americans that they needed to take a much more aggressive approach to these attacks on their citizenship and their very lives, that the approach taken by Booker T. Washington would not suffice.

Aldon: Booker T. Washington is preaching accommodationism and you black people you're seeing your communities being burned down, you're seeing your people hanging from limbs of trees.

Then you've got to try to figure out--you got to say, "Our very survival is at stake.

Either we submit and return to slavery or we find out some kind of way to fight this."

Debra: W.E.B Du Bois lived in Atlanta, and the riot was a wakeup call.

Aldon: So what does he do?

The first thing he does is he goes and he buys himself a shotgun.

Pretty much all of Du Bois' life he's pretty much a pacifist.

Du Bois: "I have never killed a bird nor shot a rabbit, I could never conceive myself killing a human being, but I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot.

If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived, I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Chad: The Atlanta riot further confirmed for Du Bois that fighting for African-American civil rights was absolutely necessary, that there could be no compromise with white supremacists and with white terrorists.

Atlanta shaped his consciousness, his sense of commitment, which he channeled into the Niagara Movement.

Debra: In the summer of 1907, he delivered an address to the movement's annual meeting in Boston.

He spoke to the movement's largest crowd ever.

Du Bois: "We are not discouraged.

Help us, brothers, for the victory which lingers must and shall prevail."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Stephen: It's a huge protest meeting at Faneuil Hall.

Hundreds of peoples are on hand.

Debra: But the meeting would be the Niagara Movement's last hurrah.

A group was suffering from a shortage of money, a narrow membership, and a bitter personal conflict.

Shawn: William Monroe Trotter was a brilliant man and a brilliant activist and strategist, but William Monroe Trotter was also a bull in a china shop.

He was a person that ruffled other people's feathers.

Debra: Du Bois complained it is impossible for him to work with other people without dictating their course absolutely according to his own narrow program.

Stephen: He had to insist on his own way.

He could not compromise.

He saw compromise as weakness and just would not do it.

Du Bois: "I am reluctantly compelled to believe that Mr. Trotter is a burden to the Niagara Movement."

Chad: Du Bois sees him as completely impossible to work with."

Debra: The conflict between Du Bois and Trotter turned on vital principles as well as enlarged egos, how much should women participate, how much should a leader control a democratic movement.

Stephen: It's the collision of those two huge egos that--those major figures in black history.

They just could not get along because each of them thought he was the king of the hill, and you can only have one king of the hill.

Du Bois: "The Niagara Movement can no longer afford to carry Mr. Trotter and be responsible for his opinions and deeds."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Debra: Just 3 years after Du Bois and Trotter co-wrote the Declaration of Principles, it happened.

William Monroe Trotter withdrew from the movement.

Trotter wrote, "You will remember that I with reason consider the Niagara Movement leadership mean, tricky, petty, worse."

Aldon: The Niagara Movement is falling apart at that time.

Chad: By 1909, the Niagara Movement was floundering, had been facing serious attacks, had been undermined by the Tuskegee Machine and the supporters of Booker T. Washington in the black press.

Stephen: They had no money.

They were always in debt.

The Niagara Movement is essentially kaput.

Debra: But the Niagara Movement did not exactly die.

It was reborn as the most successful civil rights group in the history of America.

Chad: The NAACP came into existence really as a result of the 1908 Springfield riot in Springfield, Illinois.

Stephen: It was such a shock.

This is Abraham Lincoln's hometown.

Chad: African Americans were attacked in a horrific incident of mob violence.

The fact that a race riot, a pogrom could take place in the north demonstrated that the race problem was not just a southern problem but a national problem and as such it needed a national organization to confront it.

Shawn: In 1909, there is a meeting called.

Civil rights activists from both the black and white community coming together and talking about issues.

W.E.B.

DuBois speaks at that conference.

Ray: At that meeting they decided to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and it became a surviving, lasting, growing, important interracial organization that continues to do good work to this day, the NAACP.

Chad: It only made sense from the perspective of Du Bois and other members of the leaders in the Niagara Movement to lend their support to this new effort.

The Niagara Movement morphed into the NAACP.

Debra: There was one significant difference between the two groups.

Aldon: White liberals are going to become the leadership of the NAACP.

It's going to become an interracial organization.

April: I do believe that we must work with white people, we must work with members of all communities, but the truth is they have to be allies and true allies.

Aldon: You cannot understand NAACP without understanding the Niagara Movement.

The strategy that the NAACP that they're going to use came right up out of the Niagara Movement.

That is the legacy of the Niagara Movement, therein gives it its historical significance.

Chad: Du Bois throughout his entire life was committed to exploring the meaning of democracy.

The Niagara Movement was the first time in his life where he was able to put his words, to put theory into practice, to create a movement specifically focused on the achievement of full democracy for African-American citizens.

male: One of the greatest legacies of the Niagara Movement is the black community coming together and standing up on that principle of, "I know my rights and I have the courage to defend them."

male: The Niagara Movement is inspiring because here you had people in a most difficult, challenging, threatening, dangerous, vulnerable climate saying, "I'm going to try a different way."

And that's what we need today, people who are willing and able to take the risk to life and liberty to point us in a new direction that can give us hope and win support to make a new world.

Chad: The Niagara Movement was like a shooting star in many ways.

It burst onto the scene.

It challenged Booker T. Washington and the powerful Tuskegee Machine.

It fought against incredibly powerful headwinds and left an incredibly important legacy.

Even in the few short years that it was formerly in existence, it laid the groundwork for the modern civil rights struggle.

April: We see ourselves as a continuation of the Niagara Movement.

The threat of white supremacy is very real in the same way that it was real during the Niagara Movement time.

The same type of voter suppression methods that they were fighting with directly with Jim Crow, we're still fighting those today.

We do fight for America to live up to its ideals in the same way that the Niagara Movement, and we demand more.

Chad: The story of the Niagara Movement is certainly an African-American story, but it's also an American story.

It's a story that is one of America struggling to become what it has always aspired to be, of making America true to its democratic promises for all of its citizens.

Du Bois: "Our enemies, triumphant for the present, are fighting the stars in their courses.

Justice and humanity must prevail.

We shall win.

Courage, brothers.

All across the skies sit signs of promise.

The morning breaks over blood-stained hills.

We must not falter.

Above are the everlasting stars."

W.E.B.

Du Bois.

male announcer: If you or someone you know is experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide, 24/7 counseling is available at the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Call or text 988.

For the crisis text line, text "SAVE" to 741741. female announcer: This program has been made possible by a major grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation, a private Western New York foundation dedicated to enhancing the economic vitality and quality of life for the Buffalo Niagara region through grant making and network building; with additional support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people; Community Foundation of Tampa Bay Incorporated in memory of Susan Howarth; and by Visit Buffalo Niagara, whose mission is to transform our community by inspiring visitors and locals to discover Buffalo.

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