The Niagara Movement - History of NAACP~Prof. Playthell

July 11, 1905 – The Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is organized in Niagara Falls, NY. Among the organizers were W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, and Ida B. Wells Barnett.

Join The Gist of Freedom host, Preston Washington as he welcomes author,  Professor Playthell Benjamin,  "Reconsidering The Souls Of Black Folks." Dr. Benjamin will discuss the formation and history of the NAACP and The Niagara Movement.

In February 1905, W.E.B. Dubois, John Hope, Monroe Trotter, Frederick McGhee, C. E. Bentley and 27 others met secretly in the home of Mary B. Talbert, a prominant member of Buffalo's Michigan Street Baptist Church. For more on the Michigan Street Church also see 1836, 1845, and 1892) to adopt the resolutions which lead to the founding of the Niagara Movement. The Niagara Movement renounced Booker T. Washington's accommodation policies set forth in his famed "Atlanta Compromise" speech ten years earlier. The Niagara Movement's manifesto is, in the words of Du Bois, "We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now.... We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win." They invited 59 well know African American businessmen to a meeting that summer in western New York. On July 11 thru 14, 1905 on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, twenty-nine men met and formed a group they called the Niagara Movement. The name came because of the location and the "mighty current" of protest they wished to unleash