Niagara Movement

The Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and Niagara Falls, near Fort Erie, Ontario, was where the first meeting took place in July 1905. The Niagara Movement was a call for opposition to racial segregation and disenfranchisement, and it was opposed to policies of accommodation and conciliation promoted by African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington.

During the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War, African Americans had an unprecedented level of civil freedom and civic participation, especially in the Southern United States. With the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s this began to change. By the 1890s many of the Southern states introduced laws that significantly restricted the political and civil rights of African Americans. All of them passed laws restricting voting rights, or making them significantly more difficult to exercise, and also passed laws requiring racially segregated facilities. These policies became entrenched when the United States Supreme Court in 1896 ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that law requiring "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional.

The most prominent African-American spokesman during the 1890s was Booker T. Washington, leader of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. Washington outlined a response to these policies in an 1895 speech in Atlanta, Georgia that became known as the Atlanta Compromise. The basic thrust of his approach was that Southern African-Americans should not agitate for political rights (such as the right to vote and equal treatment under the law) as long as they were provided economic opportunities and basic rights of due process. Washington also politically dominated the National Afro-American Council, the first nationwide African-American civil rights organization.

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