| The
Niagara Movement began when scholar W.E.B. DuBois called for opposition to Booker
T. Washington's position that African Americans accommodate segregation and accept
legalized white supremacy. (Washington was founder and president of the all-Black
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and at that time regarded as the nation's offi
cial Negro spokesperson.) DuBois,
the fi rst African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard, recruited
a group of well-educated Black professionals he called "The Talented Tenth."
He urged this group to create a formal platform for equal rights. A
summit was planned for Buffalo in July of 1905. When DuBois couldn't reserve hotel
space in the city the fi rst Niagara Movement meeting was held in 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). | 
