William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist.
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. The Niagara Movement was organized to oppose racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Its members felt "unmanly" the policy of accommodation and conciliation, without voting rights, promoted by Booker T. Washington. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo. The Niagara Movement was the immediate predecessor of the NAACP.
William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter, was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. An activist for African-American civil rights, he was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910, and it is the oldest Black-oriented magazine in the world. Today, The Crisis is "a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."
John Hope, born in Augusta, Georgia, was an American educator and political activist, the first African-descended president of both Morehouse College in 1906 and of Atlanta University in 1929, where he worked to develop graduate programs. Both are historically Black colleges.
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a pioneering African-American scholar, excelling in elocution, philosophy, law and classics in the Reconstruction era. He broke ground as Harvard College's first Black graduate in 1870. Within three years, he had also graduated from law school at the University of South Carolina, only to also be hired as its first Black professor, after briefly serving as associate editor for the New National Era, a newspaper owned and edited by Frederick Douglass.
Maria Louise Baldwin was an American educator and civic leader born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She lived all her life in Cambridge and Boston. Writing in 1917, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed she had achieved the greatest distinction in education to that time of any African-American not working in segregated schools.
The William Monroe Trotter House is a historic house at 97 Sawyer Avenue, atop Jones Hill in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. It was the home of African-American journalist and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934). He and his wife Geraldine Louise Pindell moved into the two-story wood-frame home when they were married in June 1899. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 for its association with Trotter, whose activism was influential in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
James Monroe Trotter was an American teacher, soldier, employee of the United States Post Office Department, a music historian, and Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D.C. Born into slavery in Mississippi, he, his two sisters and their mother Letitia were freed by their master, the child's father, and helped to move to Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up in freedom, attending school and becoming a teacher.
The Boston Guardian was an African-American newspaper, co-founded by William Monroe Trotter and George W. Forbes in 1901 in Boston and published until the 1950s.
William Henry Lewis was an African-American pioneer in athletics, law and politics. Born in Virginia to freedmen, he graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he had been one of the first African-American college football players. After going to Harvard Law School and continuing to play football, Lewis was the first African American in the sport to be selected as an All-American.
Maud Cuney Hare was an American pianist, musicologist, writer, and African-American activist in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. She was born in Galveston, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney, who led the Texas Republican Party during and after the Reconstruction Era, and his wife Adelina, a schoolteacher. In 1913 Cuney-Hare published a biography of her father.
Thomas Irving Atkins was an American attorney and politician who served as a member of the Boston City Council and General Counsel of the NAACP.
Lafayette M. Hershaw was a journalist, lawyer, and a clerk and law examiner for the United States General Land Office of the United States Department of the Interior. He was a key intellectual figure among African Americans in Atlanta in the 1880s and in Washington, D.C., from 1890 until his death. He was a leader of the intellectual social groups in the capital such as Bethel Literary and Historical Society and the Pen and Pencil Club. He was a strong supporter of W. E. B. Du Bois and was one of the thirteen organizers of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner to the NAACP. He was an officer of the D.C. Branch of the NAACP from its inception until 1928. He was also a founder of the Robert H. Terrell Law School and served as the school's president.
Geraldine Pindell Trotter (1872–1918) was an American civil rights activist and editor. Pindell Trotter was an integral fixture of Boston's African-American upper class at the turn of the 20th century. Pindell Trotter is most known for her role as the associate editor of the Boston Guardian, which was founded by her husband William Monroe Trotter.
Freeman H. M. Murray was an intellectual, civil rights activist, and journalist in Washington D.C. and Alexandria, Virginia. He was active in promoting black home-ownership, opposing Jim Crow laws and lynching, and supporting positive representation of African Americans in public art. He was a founding member of the Niagara Movement and was an editor of its journal, the Horizon, along with W. E. B. Du Bois and Lafayette M. Hershaw. Alongside his other work, Murray was an important intellectual leader and wrote an influential book of art criticism. In this, Murray was one of the first historians of African American art. His work expressed a desire that art take seriously the representation of African Americans and that slavery not be overlooked in favor of representation of heroes and glory in public art.
Butler Roland Wilson (1861–1939) was an attorney, civil rights activist, and humanitarian based in Boston, Massachusetts. Born in Georgia, he came to Boston for law school and lived there for the remainder of his life. For over fifty years, he worked to combat racial discrimination in Massachusetts. He was one of the first African-American members of the American Bar Association. Wilson was a founding member and president of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
George W. Forbes (1864-1927) was an American journalist who advocated for African-American civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for co-founding the Boston Guardian, an African-American newspaper in which he and William Monroe Trotter published editorials excoriating Booker T. Washington for his accommodationist approach to race relations. He also founded and edited the Boston Courant, one of Boston's earliest black newspapers, and edited the A. M. E. Church Review, a national publication.
The National Independent Political League (NIPL) was an American political organization that sought racial and social justice in the early 20th century. Considered a militant group, NIPL was founded by William Monroe Trotter in 1908 as the NationalNegro American Political League and operated until around 1920 as the National Independent Equal Rights League. In contrast to its more successful contemporary, the NAACP, NIPL was led and funded by African Americans. Historian Mark Schneider notes that NIPL "foreshadowed the militant organizations of the 1950s and 1960s that bypassed the NAACP."
