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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 3. The Tuskegee Compromise - 4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
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742 An American Dilemma
to evaluate the different organized forces which are today shaping Negro
policy.
4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
Among the Negro intellectuals, particularly in the North, Washington
and the gradually fortified “Tuskegee Machine” met severe criticism.® It
became vocal in 1901 when two Negro intellectuals, Monroe Trotter and
George Forbes, began the publication of the Boston Guardian? W. E, B.
Du Bois soon was drawn more and more from his brilliant scientific pur-
suits,^® and became the leader of this protest group. In The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) he gave literary form to a philosophy antagonistic to Wash-
ington’s. Du Bois demanded full social and political equality for Negroes,
according to the Constitution, and complete cultural assimilation. And
he offered his demands not as ultimate goals but as a matter of practical
policy of the day.
In the summer of 1905, twenty-nine Negro intellectuals met at Niagara
Falls (on Canadian soil, since they met discrimination in the Buffalo hotel
at which reservations had been made for the conference). They had high
hopes of forming a national protest organization with branches in the
several states to wage a battle against all forms of segregation and dis-
crimination, and, incidentally, against Washington’s gradualist and con-
ciliatory policy, which, they considered, sold out Negroes’ rights for a
pittance and even broke their courage to protest. A generation later,
Du Bois, when writing his autobiography, gives the following concen-
trated expression to this criticism:
At a time when Negro civil rights called for organized and aggressive defense, he
[Mr. Washington] broke down that defense by advising acquiescence or at least no
open agitation. During the period when laws disfranchising the’ Negro were being
passed in all the Southern states, between 1890 and 1909, and when these were being
supplemented by “Jim Crow” travel Jaws and other enactments making color caste
legal, his public speeches, while they did not entirely ignore this development tended
continually to excuse it, to emphasize the short-comings of the Negro, and were
interpreted widely as putting the chief onus for his condition upon the Negro
himself.^^
The Niagara movement held two more meetings—one at Harper’s Ferry
and issued proclamations. But it never grew to be anything more than
a feeble junto. It had against it Booker T. Washington and all his Negro
and white friends, and it was not discreet for ambitious young Negroes to
belong to this movement.
The Niagara movement represented the first organized attempt to raise
the Negro protest against the great reaction after Reconstruction. Its main
importance was that it brought to open conflict and wide public debate two
types of Negro strategy, one stressing accommodation and the other rais-
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