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worth repeating |
UGA education professor Derrick Alridge delivered a talk on the Niagara Movement, the national theme for Black History Month. Some excerpts: “On March 5, 1897, a group of so-called Negro intellectuals met in Washington, D.C., for the first full meeting of the American Negro Academy. The American Negro Academy in many ways was also a response to the ‘Tuskegee machine’ and Booker T. Washington. Just two years earlier, Booker T. Washington had given his famous Atlanta Compromise speech. The American Negro Academy was comprised of great men, whose purpose was to facilitate literary, physical, ethnographic, cultural investigation of Africa and its peoples throughout the world. . . . One of the main purposes of the American Negro Academy was to show that blacks had actually made a contribution to civilization. . . . “There was only one problem with the American Negro Academy and that is that it was charged with being too elite. . . . Du Bois set out to use social science and literature as a means to address the so-called race or Negro problem. “However, the popularity of Booker T. Washington and his control of the black press created a climate in which some Northern blacks decided to create another organization to oppose Washington. The American Negro Academy had a very difficult time trying to respond to Booker T. Washington, because Washington talked in the language of the people. The American Negro Academy focused primarily on issuing occasional papers and engaging in conversations about black poetry and black literature, whereas Booker T. Washington was speaking directly to the people. So out of that conflict Du Bois and other African-American intellectuals founded an organization that would be called the Niagara Movement.” |
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—Beth
Roberts |
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