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FREEDOMWAYS                             SECOND QUARTER 1973

the niagara movement begins

In 1905, Du Bois called a conference of black leaders in Niagara Falls. Their Declaration of Principles stated: "We believe that Negroes should protest emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their political rights. We believe in manhood suffrage; we believe that no man is so good, intelligent or wealthy as to be entrusted wholly with the welfare of his neighbor." They demanded an unfettered and unsubsidized press, equal economic opportunity, equal education, a fair administration of justice, and an end to segregation based on race and color, a belief in the dignity of labor, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood. For three years this group, incorporated as the "Niagara Movement," met and renewed their protests against injustice: 1906 at Harpers Ferry; Boston, 1907; Oberlin, 1908. Finally it merged with the NAACP.

  The Committee for Improving Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York City, and the National League for Protection of Colored Women formed in 1905 in New York aimed at equality in economic and social spheres. The biracial League for the Protection of Colored Women with a black field secretary was founded and had branches in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Norfolk. By 1905 the Voice fo the Negro was criticizing Washington's philosophy, and Washington's control of the Afro-American Council had so weakened that the Council no longer supported a restrictive franchise.

  In 1906 a race riot erupted in Springfield, Ohio. In Brownsville, Texas, a black soldier of the First Battalion of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, United States Colored Troops, had a confrontation with a white Brownsville merchant. On the basis of an inspector's report claiming that Blacks had murdered and maimed citizens, and when the men involved refused to testify against their fellow soldiers, President Theodore Roosevelt accused them of a "conspiracy of silence," discharged the three companies of the First Battalion and disqualified them from future military or civil service. Sixty-six years later, in 1972, the Army cleared the records of these one hundred and sixty-seven black soldiers dishonorably discharged for the Brownsville Affray which the United States Army maintains is the only documented case of mass punishment in its history. No attempt, however, was made to determine if any of the men were still alive and no back pay allowances were provided for their descendants.1

  A political-economic riot, the most devastating for years to come, occurred in Atlanta in 1906. For several days the city was paralyzed,

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