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I think it's time to more clearly mark Niagara Falls' place in history. One of the last bills President Clinton signed into law, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Act, approved $7 million in funding for the capital campaign of the Freedom Center in Cincinnati. The Act also authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to provide $16 million in funding over four years for the construction of facilities, development of exhibits and programs, and implementation of the Freedom Center's cooperative agreement with the National Park Service to interpret the History of the Underground Railroad.
According to Ed Rigaud, president and CEO of the Center, more than $60 million already has been raised, more than half of the money coming from the private sector.
Hello up there--is anybody hearing this? Can we get a slice of this pie?
Let us celebrate our role in the success of the Underground Railroad. Where are the plaques and statues of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and W.E.B. DuBois? Why is this landscape so void of all of those people who came here and stood in the majesty of this great place to cry out for basic freedom and equal justice?
In four years, we should celebrate the founding of the Niagara Movement with a convention of people from around the world who still are struggling to enjoy the most fundamental human rights. I call on all that read this to stand up and help get Niagara Falls ready for a "homecoming." It is time to convene the New Niagara Movement!
When they gathered here 96 years ago, they came to make a statement in the midst of a nation still torn by the vestiges of war. They came from as far away as Minnesota, Georgia, Illinois and even Kansas. They came to protest the conditions that continued to enslave them.
The Black "African American" communities were being systematically excluded from the mainstream economy, barred from education, unable to participate in the electoral process. The lynchings and gang violence against them were at their peak throughout the Nation, North and South.
The Niagara Movement, which later became known as the NAACP, was launched from right here in this area. They had planned to have a conference in a local hotel, but were turned away, the story goes, by a convention of Elks who seemed to have booked every hotel in the area. Ironically, the group met secretly in the home of Mary Talbert, a graduate of Oberlin College and the wife of William H. Talbert, a wealthy businessman. She was a member of Buffalo's famous Michigan Street Baptist Church. Like the other well-educated "founders" under the leadership of DuBois, they considered themselves to be an elite, the "Talented Tenth."
They issued a Declaration of Principles, which reads almost as though it could have been written today.
In detail, they wrote, "our demands are clear and unequivocal.
"First. We would vote: with the right to vote goes everything: freedom, manhood, the honor of your wives, the chastity of your daughters, the right to work, and the chance to rise, and let no man listen to those who deny this.
"We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever.
"Second. We want discrimination in public accommodations to cease.
"Third. We claim the right of freemen to walk, talk, and be with them that wish to be with us.
"Fourth. We want the law enforced against rich as well as poor: against capitalists as well as laborer; against white as well as black. We are not more lawless than the white race: we are more often arrested, convicted and mobbed. We want the Constitution of the country enforced. We want Congress to take charge of Congressional elections. We want the Fourteenth Amendment carried out to the letter and every state disenfranchised in Congress, which attempts to disenfranchise its rightful voters. We want the Fifteenth Amendment enforced and no state allowed to base its franchise simply on color.
"The failure of the Republican Party in Congress at the session just closed to redeem its pledge of 1904 with reference to suffrage conditions at the South seems a plain, deliberate, and premeditated breach of promise, and stamps that party as guilty of obtaining votes under false pretense.
"Fifth. We want our children educated. The school system in the country districts of the South is a disgrace, and in few towns and cities are the Negro schools what they should be. We want the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in the South." NEXT ISSUE: Part two of the Niagara Movement.