Skip to Content

The Niagara Movement

Thumbnail for Knowledge Wasn't Enough Video

In this 1961 interview, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) recounted how an experience he had as a professor at Atlanta University in 1899—a firsthand encounter with the aftermath of a brutal lynching—inspired his transformation from academic to activist.

We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.

Niagara Movement, Declaration of Principles, 1905