The Niagara Movement was W.E.B. Du Bois’s first attempt to form a civil rights organization and the first substantial Black-organized protest movement of the twentieth century, leading to the founding of the NAACP in 1909. Its first meeting convened in 1905 on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in Fort Erie, where Lakes Michigan, Huron, Superior, and Erie empty into the Niagara River. Its second meeting convened in 1906 at Harper’s Ferry, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers and the site of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid to end slavery. In its demands, Du Bois declared that Black Americans would vote, sought an end to discrimination in public accommodation, insisted on equal enforcement of the law against rich and poor, capitalist and laborer, white and black, and called for the education of children, warning that either the United States would destroy ignorance or ignorance would destroy the United States.

Photo: Larry Gertner

Photo: Larry Gertner

Photo: Larry Gertner

Photo: Larry Gertner