Existing comment:
For All Americans: The 1906 Meeting at Harpers Ferry:
The Niagara Movement's first meeting on American soil and their first public meeting convened on the campus of Storer College in Harpers Ferry on August 16, 1906. WEB Du Bois reminisced about this historic conference in his Autobiography:
".... instead of meeting in secret, we met openly... and had in significance if not in numbers one of the greatest meetings that American Negroes ever held... and we talked some of the plainest English that had been given voice to by black men in America."
Mary White Ovington, future co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) covered the Harpers Ferry conference for the New York Evening Post in 1906. She was one of the few white, mainstream press reporters to write about the Niagara Movement. At her own suggestion, WEB Du Bois had invited Ovington to come to Harpers Ferry. She recorded the following impression of the participants. "Their power and intellectual ability is manifest on hearing or talking with them."
On the last night of the 1906 conference, the Niagara Movement's "Address to the Country" was read aloud to the delegates. This five-point resolution written by Du Bois was among the most eloquent and forceful declarations produced at any of the Niagara meetings.
1. We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever.
2. We want discrimination in public accommodation to cease. Separation... is un-American, undemocratic and silly.
3. We claim the right of freemen to walk, talk and be with them who wish to be with us.
4. We want the laws enforced... against white as well as black.
5. We want our children educated... either the U.S. will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the U.S.
The 1906 meeting dealt with the full spectrum of civil rights concerns, both social and political. And it was here that the female members of Niagara spoke out and won the right to attend the private committee meetings. At the next year's conference in Boston, the women of Niagara were full-fledged participants. |