THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT The Niagara Movement began when scholar W.E.B. DuBois, the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard, recruited a group of well-educated Black professionals he called The Talented Tenth and urged them to create a formal platform for equal rights. A summit was planned for 1905, and DuBois requested a quiet, out of the way place with pastoral recreation options, so it was held at the Erie Beach Hotel in Fort Erie, Ontario. The Declaration of Principles authored by DuBois as a result of this meeting became the basis for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Buffalonian Mary Talbert played a pivotal role in the advent of the Niagara Movement when she opened her Michigan Avenue home to DuBois, John Hope and 27 others for a secret planning meeting of the famous summit. Talbert went on to serve as president, vice president and director of the NAACP, and as chairman of its Anti-Lynching Committee, she lobbied nationally for passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. During WWI, she assisted with war loan drives, and became a Red Cross nurse with the American expeditionary forces in France. A year before her death in 1922, Mary Burnett Talbert became the first African American woman to receive the prestigious NAACP Spingarn Award. She rests today in Forest Lawn. She was inducted into the National Womens Hall of Fame in October, 2005.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 00:37:54 +0000