Emery T. Morris

Emery T. Morris, born in Salem, Massachusetts, on October 9, 1849, was a prominent member of the Niagara Movement, an early civil rights organization. A nephew of African American attorney and abolitionist Robert Morris, he moved from Salem with his parents at age five and grew up near Kendall Square in an African American neighborhood. Educated in the Cambridge public schools, he became active in politics early. In 1905 he joined W.E.B. Du Bois, Clement Morgan, and others in founding the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which represented blacks who advocated political and social freedom and immediate equality for all in opposition to the accommodationist views of Booker T. Washington. After the Niagara Movement broke up in 1907, Morris split from Du Bois and joined William Monroe Trotter to found the National Negro Political League, a rival civil rights organization, in 1910; unlike the NAACP, which was interracial, the NNPL was led and controlled by African Americans. Morris ran for a seat on the Cambridge Common Council in 1907, but when it became apparent that he was sure to win, the mayor appointed him deputy sealer of weights and measures in exchange for his withdrawal from the race. Around this time he moved from Hampshire Street, near the Prospect Street home of his friend Morgan, to Parker Street, then being settled by middle-class African American families. Although he never went to college and worked most of his life as a druggist, porter, and stationary steam engineer, he assembled one of the most extensive antislavery libraries in New England, and students often visited his house at their professors' recommendation. He died on September 24, 1924, and was buried in Cambridge Cemetery.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States