Page 51 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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Niagara Movement was founded by prominent Black leaders to oppose Washington’s
philosophy and to promote a Black struggle; it was led by W. E. B. Du Bois.
The Niagara Movement was the first modern Black organization that gave an or-
ganized forum for the struggle of freedom, equality, and multicultural democracy. It
was organized mainly by well-to-do northern and educated urban African Americans.
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Its members numbered about four hundred.
This movement “placed full responsi-
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bility for the race problem squarely on the whites”
and demanded political freedom
and equality and protested for political rights, suffrage, the right to equal treatment in
public accommodations and access to equal opportunity. It denounced racial segrega-
tion, separate-but-equal racist doctrine, and disenfranchisement laws. The unofficial
organ for this movement was a magazine known as Horizon.
W. E. B. Du Bois was the most influential opponent of Washington’s policy; he se-
verely criticized Washington’s emphasis on industrial education at the cost of higher
education. Du Bois attacked Washington for asking African Americans to give up the
struggle for political power, civil rights, and higher education, and exposed the conse-
quences of his policy that led to further disenfranchisement,civil inferiority,and with-
drawal of aid from many Black educational institutions, specifically those offering
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liberal arts curricula.
It was William Monroe Trotter, the editor of the Boston
Guardian, who convinced and helped Du Bois to attack Washington’s policy. He was
an uncompromising critic of racial segregation and accommodation and considered
Washington “as the agent of oppression.” 141 The Niagara Movement was the forerun-
ner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The NAACP grew out of an interracial conference in 1909 on the Black status.
The NAACP was formed by Black intellectual activists such as William Monroe Trot-
ter,W. E. B. Du Bois, the noted antilynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett,White pro-
gressives, and Christian socialists. Meier and Rudwick say,“The interracial character
of the NAACP was essential to the success of its early work.The prestige of the names
of well-known white progressives . . . gave the agitation for Negro rights better fi-
nancial support and, more important, a wider audience. Except for Du Bois, who be-
came director of publicity and editor of the Association’s organ, the Crisis, all of the
chief officials were at first white. Several of these white leaders seemed paternalistic
and condescending in their dealings with Negro associates in the NAACP.” 142 The
principal tactics of this protest organization were persuasion, education, and legal ac-
tion to achieve equal rights for Black Americans.
Another important civil rights organization was the National Urban League,which
was founded by conservative Black leaders and White philanthropists in 1911 to im-
prove the conditions of the Black masses in urban America.While the NAACP used
legal approaches to fight against American apartheid, the National Urban League used
moral persuasion to convince racist businessmen and labor unions not to discriminate
against Black workers. Black and White conservatives did not like the legal approach
that the NAACP was using to challenge American apartheid. Emphasizing the im-
portance of industrial education, recognizing the potential of receiving financial sup-
port for their projects from White philanthropists, accommodationists like Booker T.
Washington opposed the view of politically, morally, and legally challenging American
apartheid. Born in slavery and educated at Hampton Institute in Virginia,Washington
was taught “the doctrine of economic advancement with acceptance of disenfran-
chisement and with conciliation of the white South,” and his ideology and strategy
could not go beyond that of the racist White establishment. 143 He founded and be-