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The Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and Niagara Falls, near Fort Erie, Ontario, was where the first meeting took place in July 1905. The Niagara Movement was a call for opposition to racial segregation and disenfranchisement, and it was opposed to policies of accommodation and conciliation promoted by African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington. ==Background== During the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War, African Americans had an unprecedented level of civil freedom and civic participation, especially in the Southern United States. With the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s this began to change. By the 1890s many of the Southern states introduced laws that significantly restricted the political and civil rights of African Americans.〔Klarman, p. 10〕 All of them passed laws restricting voting rights, or making them significantly more difficult to exercise, and also passed laws requiring racially segregated facilities. These policies became entrenched when the United States Supreme Court in 1896 ruled in ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' that law requiring "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. The most prominent African-American spokesman during the 1890s was Booker T. Washington, leader of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. Washington outlined a response to these policies in an 1895 speech in Atlanta, Georgia that became known as the Atlanta Compromise. The basic thrust of his approach was that Southern African-Americans should not agitate for political rights (such as the right to vote and equal treatment under the law) as long as they were provided economic opportunities and basic rights of due process.〔Brown and Stentiford, pp. 55–56〕 Washington also politically dominated the National Afro-American Council, the first nationwide African-American civil rights organization.〔Fox, pp. 46–48〕 By the turn of the 20th century activists within the African-American community began demanding a more active opposition to racist government policies than the type advocated by Washington. Early opponents of Washington's "accommodationist" policies included W. E. B. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, and William Monroe Trotter, a Boston activist who in 1901 founded the ''Boston Guardian'' newspaper as a platform for radical activism.〔Fox, pp. 29–30〕〔Lewis, pp. 179–182〕 In 1902 and 1903 groups of activists sought to gain a larger voice in the debate at the conventions of the National Afro-American Council, but were procedurally marginalized because the conventions were dominated by Washington supporters (also known as Bookerites).〔Fox, pp. 38–40〕 Trotter in July 1903 orchestrated a confrontation with Washington in Boston, a stronghold of activism, that resulted in a minor melee and the arrest of Trotter and others; the event garnered national headlines.〔Fox, pp. 49–58〕 In January 1904 Washington, with funding assistance from Andrew Carnegie, organized a meeting in New York to unite African American and civil rights spokesmen. Trotter was not invited, but Du Bois and a few other activists were. Du Bois was then sympathetic to the activist cause and suspicious of Washington's motives, and noted that the number of activists invited was small relative to the number of Bookerites. The meeting laid the foundation for a committee that included both Washington and Du Bois, but quickly fractured, and dissolved when Du Bois resigned in July 1905.〔Lewis, pp. 208–211〕 By this time both Du Bois and Trotter recognized the need for a well-organized anti-Washington activist group. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Niagara Movement」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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