An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP

Chapter 8. “It Is Strike Now or Never”

C h a p t e r 8 “It Is Strike Now or Never” Let us no longer allow ourselves to be amenable to the just reproach that though we have the strength of a giant we use it like a child. —T. Thomas Fortune Courage brothers! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing. . . . The Slav is moving in his might, the yellow minions are testing liberty, the black Africans are writhing toward the light, and everywhere the laborer, with ballot in his hand, is opening the gates of Opportunity and Peace. —W. E. B. Du Bois Building on the momentum of the final months of 1905, the Afro-American Council entered 1906 full of energy and primed to have a successful year. The Constitution League and the Niagara Movement also entered the New Year focused and ready to organize. Such determination and concentration was necessary for, despite the best efforts of these organizations, it seemed they were only slowing the steamroller of white supremacy. Whites continued to violate and rewrite the rights of African Americans with impunity. Moreover, racial tensions, which often lead to violence, continued to increase with the proliferation of sensationalized scare stories about black crime, rampant black sexuality, and “negro domination.” At the beginning of 1906 such a situation was epitomized by the popularity of Thomas Dixon’s best-selling novel The Clansman, the theatrical adaption of which was traveling throughout the country to rave reviews. In this climate each organization understood the importance of its individual existence, but over the course of the year unfore- “It Is Strike Now or Never” 263 seen events would pull the three groups closer together and lay the groundwork for a unified interracial organization that would stand for black rights on the same basic principles outlined by T. Thomas Fortune nearly twenty years before. Indeed, though historians have paid scant attention, the immediate years preceding the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 were active ones for all of the nation’s civil rights organizations. It was not just the Niagara Movement that was pushing Fortune’s 1884 vision of a national civil rights organization: a permanent organization that demanded equality; a national association that came together annually in convention, but was based in local and state branches throughout the country; an organized effort to fight not only racism in general, but to contest discrimination and mob violence by using the local, state, and federal courts and governments. The Afro-American Council and the interracial Constitution League, as well as the Committee of Twelve, were also vigorously working during this period—building test cases, lobbying the federal government, creating petitions, and publishing propaganda to counter the disfranchising and discriminatory actions of the southern states that were becoming increasingly accepted or at least tolerated throughout the nation. The efforts of all these organizations lay the foundation for what would become the NAACP as the groups worked both independently and collectively to demand that the nation uphold the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and bring an end to the spread of white supremacy and racial violence. * * * Both the Niagara Movement and the Afro-American Council sought to communicate to the nation that they were alive and well and moving forward with their various agendas. In January 1906, as previously noted, W. E. B. Du Bois, general secretary of the Niagara Movement, published a piece in the Voice of the Negro concerning the progress of his organization—now seventeen branches strong—and promoted the group’s proposed November convention. The Afro-American Council sent Bishop Walters, Lewis G. Jordan, and J. Douglas Wetmore on speaking tours throughout the country. Additionally, the Council’s legal team laid out its plans of attack against the continuing efforts to extend Virginia’s Jim Crow law into the District of Columbia. While moving forward with their own plans, both the Council and the Niagara Movement were also beginning to cooperate with the Constitution 264 Chapter 8 League. During the final months of 1905, John Milholland began organizing a mass meeting on the issue of black rights to be held at Cooper Union in New York City. The purpose of the gathering was “to protest against the way in which the Coloured Citizens [were] treated in the South” and to mark the opening of the League’s Southern Suffrage Campaign. On...