Part III: Demands for Full Citizenship

Delegates of The Niagara Movement

Even as the white women’s movement veered into pragmatic racism, black male leadership also experimented with an analogous and equally unsuccessful class strategy — what historian Nell Painter aptly labeled “the politics of the Representative Negro.” Civil rights historiography has tended to underplay the shared elitism of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine and Du Bois’s Talented Tenth, their mutually held expectation that exemplary black conduct would overcome indiscriminate white prejudice. This theory that the best black men and white men understood each other Du Bois himself had serenely asserted in 1890 as the U.S. Senate debated for the last time until late in the next century a federal elections bill. “When you have the right sort of black voters,” he sniffed, speaking of the Lodge Bill, “you will need no election laws.”

Washington, of course, fully concurred. In contrast to the Washingtonians, however, the Du Boisians abandoned as a cruel fiction the supposed interracial community of notable males after the south’s constitutional conventions serially eliminated virtually all Negro men, exemplary and ordinary. The Supreme Court’s 1896 separate-and-equal decision in Plessy v. Ferguson ratified white supremacy as the national doctrine.

The response was the Niagara Movement, the prototype of the national civil rights organization. It was ironical that the twentieth-century’s first collective attempt by African Americans to demand full citizenship was forced to spring into life on Canadian soil. The hotel bookings in Buffalo had somehow vanished at the last minute, forcing Du Bois to scramble to find accommodations in Ft. Erie, Canada, for 29 deeply agitated colored men and one teen-age son in July 1905.

Working with William Monroe Trotter, his fellow Harvard man and Boston newspaper publisher, Du Bois drafted the “Declaration of Principles” defining and excoriating the manifold racial wrongs of the era. The Niagara “Declaration of Principles” appears to owe something in language and defiant spirit to the “Declaration of Sentiments,” drafted less than 200 miles away on Lake Ontario.

Just as Stanton and Mott refused to allow man to “destroy [woman’s] confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life,” Du Bois and Trotter refused to allow “the impression to remain that the Negro American assents to inferiority, that he is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.” One notes that, as they drew guidelines for a militantly uncompromising African-American future, that the Niagarites paused to acknowledge a debt to “our fellow men from the abolitionists down to those who today still stand for equal opportunity. . . .”

In 1909, the Niagara Movement merged with the Committee on the Negro to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the second Niagara meeting at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia three years earlier, women had been admitted at Du Bois’s insistence and over Monroe Trotter’s objection to associate membership. Despite the sour 1907 response to the suffragist, Du Bois demonstrated surprising precocity in advancing women’s rights issues as founding editor of the NAACP’s monthly journal, The Crisis. Even so, he retained serious doubts that white women would be “any more “liberal or humane toward the black, the poor and the unfortunate than white men are.”

A “Talks About Women” column monopolized by white suffragists such as Inez Milholland and Fanny Villard appeared in the inaugural 1910 issue of The Crisis, followed by attention-catching 1911and 1912 interracial suffrage symposia featuring Adela Hunt Logan, Martha Gruening, Addie Hunton, and Mary Terrell, among other suffragists. The Crisis deplored the refusal of NAWSA’s resolutions committee to consider Martha Gruening’s collaboration petition presented on behalf of the NAACP. Even after NAWSA’s leadership attempted unsuccessfully to bar Ida Wells and a small coterie of black women from marching in the historic 1913 District of Columbia parade, Du Bois expressed unwavering suffragist support. “Every argument for woman suffrage is an argument for Negro suffrage,” he declared. “The man of Negro blood who hesitates to do them justice is false to his race, his ideals and his country.”

This was strong language in the face of the virtual exclusion by NAWSA and its coming rival, Alice Paul’s Congressional Union, of black women and their special issues. For the Congressional Union and its successor, the National Women’s Party (NWP), civil rights was a racial issue not a gender issue. As one ranking NAACP officer snarled, “if [the NWP] could get the suffrage amendment through, without enfranchising colored women, they would do it in a moment.”

The “woman’s hour” finally arrived 50 years after the “Negro’s hour,” with the ratified nineteenth amendment. Fair to say, a great number of white women, black men, and black women continued to find much to be dissatisfied about. For women, the culture of patriarchy and the economics of dependency confined most to the kitchen, nursery, and the secretarial pool. The federal government bestowed the protective beneficence of the Sheppard-Towner Act [passed by Congress in 1921 to provide legislation authorizing federal aid to states for maternity, child health and welfare programs, and ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1922]. For people of color, the great majority of whom remained in the South until after World War II, the formal right to vote was almost meaningless. Plessy v. Ferguson enforced second-class citizenship, locking them into racially defined occupations and living spaces.

For middle-and-upper-middle-class women, a new label was applied to their post nineteenth-amendment malaise, and frustrated aspirations: feminism. Pulling away from NAWSA’s liberal political agenda, traditional family values, and protective legislation for working women, the wealthier NWP feminists launched their long campaign for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). If Alva Belmont and Alice Paul muted Crystal Eastman’s free love plea and persuaded Margaret Sanger to deemphasize abortion rights in favor of eugenics for better babies, the NWP’s unmistakable goal remained equality that empowered autonomy.

Interestingly, an unsolicited 1920 Du Bois essay, “The Damnation of Women,” could have been the New Woman’s manifesto. It said: “The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge,” the influential essay insisted. “She must have the right of motherhood at her discretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if we are ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guarding the weak in weakness do we gin strength, but by making weakness free and strong.”

The affluent members of Mary Terrell’s National Association of Colored Women (NACW) generally applauded such sentiments and supported the ERA. Mary McLeod Bethune’s less cosmopolitan National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) generally disapproved them and opposed the ERA. Nor did Du Bois express the majority opinions of an NAACP membership ill disposed to cheer the equal rights aspirations of feminist organizations that evinced a chronic myopia about the scourge of lynching. Who could excuse the mischief perpetrated by NAWSA’s affiliate, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. After its opposition to the 1934 Costigan-Wagner federal anti-lynching bill was exposed during a climactic moment in the Senate’s longest filibuster, embittered African Americans scoffed that Jesse Daniel Ames’s genteel Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was a preposterous misnomer.

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