Founding of the NAACP

In June 1905 Du Bois and a rebellious group of blacks met on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and drew up a platform for aggressive action. The group's name came from the location of the first meeting -- the Niagara Movement. The movement never gained a membership of more than 400, and it dissolved at the end of five years.

Niagara Movement

The immediate cause of the founding of the NAACP was the riot on the night of August 14, 1908 that devastated Springfield, Illinois, the town where the Great Emancipator lay entombed. It signaled that the race problem was no longer regional but national (Lewis 1994:387). Whites called a conference for Lincoln's birthday 1909. Some members of the Niagara Movement, most prominently Du Bois, threw in their lot with the biracial NAACP when it began to function in 1910. In that year Du Bois joined the organization's staff as director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis.

1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois

Legal action became the main tactic of the NAACP. In 1915 the NAACP won a Supreme Court suit that invalidated the "grandfather clause" which made it illegal for most Southern blacks to vote. The NAACP's tactic of educational persuasion was based on the premise that white Americans would treat blacks as equals once they overcame their own ignorance. This message was well-suited to the liberal philosophy of the founders (Morris 84:14).

Conservative and Liberal Blacks

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois

Martial (1944:743) wrote that the two traditions of conservatism and liberalism, the same that have always existed among the whites, existed in the black community. The fight between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois established the dominant pattern of political thinking among blacks and whites in the South during the period of Jim Crow dominance. Groups of followers assembled behind these two men and their successors. These two political outlooks continued as dual systems, but it is important to note that neither fundamentally threatened the Southern white system of domination. In the South, the NAACP was always a relatively weak organization. In the Jim Crow era virtually the entire political spectrum in the South basically worked within and accommodated to the racist system.

Vernon Johns

You can bet that Martial never met Vernon Johns. Johns did not approve of either side of this debate and their associated ways of thinking. And in this sense he was a maverick and a rebel. His thoughts were beyond this debate and because he did he inspired those who eventually carried out the destruction of the Southern apartheid system, Martin Luther King Jr. being the foremost of these. Johns had disdain for the conservatives for their accommodation to the system of segregation. But Johns also disliked the NAACP for pretty much the same reason. He felt they were not really fighting hard enough against the segregationist system. Their legal approach was too slow and too ineffective for Johns. He also did not like the NAACP because it was elitist, representing the interests and approaches of the black middle class. Vernon Johns was no gradualist. And therefore he was beyond the political spectrum as it existed in the white and black communities. That is why, as we shall see, he was largely ignored both by conservatives and liberals. (source: Chapter 5 Vernon Johns Attends Virginia Seminary, 1912-1914)

Native American Men at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute

Young Men at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute

Seated left to right: Arihotchkish (Gros Ventre), Frank Pamani (Sioux, Crow Creek), Ahuka (Arikara). Standing, left to right: Tiscaufuh (Arikara), Sayeda (Mandan), Uhahkeumpa (Dakota, Standing Rock), Ecorrupttaha (Mandan), Henry Karunch (Arikara, Sioux) Hampton, Virginia, November 1878

Valentine Richmond History Center, p.73.10.2

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, recalls the "Hampton Experiment" in Indian education. In Chapter 6 entitled, "Black Race Red Race," Booker T. writes: "About this time the experiment was being tried for the first time, by General Armstrong, of educating Indians at Hampton. Few people then had any confidence in the ability of the Indians to receive education and to profit by it. General Armstrong was anxious to try the experiment systematically on a large scale. He secured from the reservations in the Western states over one hundred wild and for the most part perfectly ignorant Indians, the greater proportion of whom were young men. The special work which the General desired me to do was to be a sort of "house father" to the Indian young men—that is, I was to live in the building with them and have the charge of their discipline, clothing, rooms, and so on...."

"The things that they [Indian Students] disliked most, I think, were to have their long hair cut, to give up wearing their blankets, and to cease smoking; but no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man's clothes, eats the white man's food, speaks the white man's language, and professes the white man's religion."--Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery

The "Indian Experiment" at Hampton Institute

The Hampton Institute is a private school known primarily as significant in the growth of black education and culture in the United States..., but for many years it also educated small groups of Indians.

Founded as the Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in 1868 by Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, a white whose interest in black education was stimulated while leading a colored regiment during the Civil War, it became a model for the numerous black normal and industrial schools subsequently established. It also influenced Lt. Richard H. Pratt in his founding of Carlisle Indian School, Pa.

The Indian Dormitory or "Wigwam" Hampton Institute. (Hampton Institute)

In 1878 a group of about 17 young Indians who had been released as prisoners of war from Fort Marion, Fla., began to attend Hampton, the only school that had responded to Pratt's appeal for their further education under Government auspices.

That same year Pratt recruited 49 additional Indians in the West, including 9 girls. Indians attended the school until 1923, though the Government discontinued appropriations in 1912. Hampton's distinguished alumnus Booker T. Washington returned to his alma mater in 1879-81 as secretary to Armstrong, and among his duties in 1880 took charge of the Indian dormitory.

Booker T. Washington

Numerous buildings on the campus date from the 19th century. Pertinent to Indian education is the Wigwam, erected in 1878 to house the students from Fort Marion. A museum in the Administration Building is devoted to Indian cultural displays, contributed mainly by ex-students.

source: National Park Services

Booker T. Washington Speech: Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are

Booker T. Washington

"Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are"

Booker T. Washington’s 'Atlanta Compromise Speech'

Booker T. Washington: Mr. President and gentlemen of the Board of Directors and citizens. One third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I must convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, and Secretaries and masses of my race, when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized, than by the managers of this magnificent exposition at every stage of its progress.

It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom. Not only this, but the opportunities here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress.Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of the bottom, that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill, that the political convention of some teaching had more attraction than starting a dairy farm or a stockyard.

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: “Water, water. We die of thirst.” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time, the signal, “Water, send us water!” went up from the distressed vessel. And was answered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A third and fourth signal for water was answered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of preservating friendly relations with the southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I have said to my own race: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.

The African in the US: The Booker T. Washington Era - Dr. John Henrik Clarke - Part 5 AHN - John, Henrik, Clarke, Booker, Washington, African, History, Black, Egypt, Kemet, WEB, DuB
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DuBois Congratulates Booker T. Washington

Although W. E. B. DuBois would later publish his pointed challenge to Booker T. Washington's educational and political philosophy in his celebrated work, Souls of Black Folk (1903), at the time of Washington's Atlanta speech, DuBois wrote this letter to express his congratulations.

W. E. B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington, September 24, 1895. Autograph letter.

My dear Mr. Washington,

Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta—it was a word fitly spoken..

Sincerely Yours,

W.E.. B. Du Bois

Wilberforce, 24 Sept., '95