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THE AMENIA CONFERENCES      DIGGS

factories closed, all transportation stopped; and whites embarked upon general destruction of black life and property. On his way back to Atlanta, Du Bois wrote his "Litany." The Atlanta Civic League composed of black and white citizens was eventually organized to work for improvement of social conditions and to prevent other riots. No action, however, was brought against the rioters. As a result of the Atlanta riot, the Afro-American Council became more militant, less amenable to Washington's control, and at their October convention vigorously condemned voting restrictions, Jim Crow and mob violence. The manifesto written by Du Bois in 1906 for the Niagara Meeting at Harpers Ferry decried violence by whites against Blacks declaring that "in its naked nastiness, the New American creed" fears "to let black men even try to rise lest they become equals of the white. And this in the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ. The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice." In the same year, in Macon, Georgia, several hundred Blacks met at a state convention under the leadership of William Jefferson White, and formed the Equal Rights Association which rejected Washington's philosophy. To protest and fight against Jim Crow streetcars, Blacks in Austin, Nashville and Savannah organized their own transportation companies.

In 1907, William Lloyd Garrison II wrote that there had never been an affirmative majority for the abolition of slavery in the North except for the brief period when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed; that Northerners had only been more subtle in their opposition to Blacks.

In 1908 came the riot in Springfield, Illinois, so violent that the governor called in forty-two hundred militia men. One hundred arrests were made with fifty indictments. The alleged leaders of the riot escaped punishment and Springfield engaged in a political economic boycott to drive out black residents. Oswald Garrison Villard spoke out editorially in the New York Evening Post against the Springfield race riot. William English Walling in an article "Race War in the North" in the Independent condemned the Springfield riot and urged Blacks first to seek protection from proper authorities when attacked and then to defend themselves and resist to the extent that rioters would think twice before continuing the racism that dominated and threatened the North and even political democracy itself.

Led by Charles Edward Russell, the Liberal Club in New York City responded to Walling's proposal to establish a bi-racial organiza-

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