4. The Niagara Movement of 1905 laid the groundwork for later institutions dedicated to civil rights
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Harvard University, grew disenchanted with concessions from other influential Black leaders around 1900. In particular, he objected to Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory attitudes expressed in his Atlanta Compromise. Washington agreed to White political domination in exchange for Black educational equality and equal protection under the law. Though at first, Du Bois supported the compromise, he quickly came to see it as a surrender, and in 1903 published The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays on race and sociology. One essay, Of Booker T. Washington and Others, condemned Washington’s position.
His views led to an invitation to meet with several like-minded Black leaders and scholars, many of them lawyers, to create the Niagara Movement. The group first met near Niagara Falls, though on the Canadian side. At the meeting, attended by 29 men, all of whom declared themselves against the conciliatory policies of Washington (they called themselves anti-Bookerites) they drafted a Declaration of Principles. They demanded suffrage for all Black men of voting age, equal economic opportunities, and legal reforms. The Niagara Movement, opposed by Booker T. Washington, proved short-lived and disbanded in 1909, though its followers, including Du Bois, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) later that same year, and along similar lines.