Delivered at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Aug. 16, 1906.
The men of the Niagara Movement coming from the toil of the year's
hard work and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily
bread turn toward the nation and again ask again, in the name
of ten million, the privilege of a hearing.
In the past year the work of the Negro-hater has flourished in
the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American
citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man's
ballot has progressed and the fifty and more representatives of
stolen votes still sit in the nation's capital. Discrimination
in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of
our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color
discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary
decencies. Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests.
We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our
full manhood rights!
We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn
American, political, civil and social; and until we get these
rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America!
The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true
Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland,
false to its founding, become in truth, the land of the thief
and the home of the slave, a byword and a hissing among the nations
for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments.
Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk
threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its
fellow citizens born and bred on it soil. Stripped of verbiage
and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness, the new American creed
says: "Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become
the equals of the white." And this is the land that professes
to follow Jesus Christ! The blasphemy of such a course is only
matched by its cowardice.
In detail, 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 accommodation to cease.
Separation in railway and street cars, based simply on race and
color, is un-American, undemocratic, and silly.
Third. We claim the right of freemen to walk, talk, and be with
them that wish to be with us. No man has a right to choose another
man's friends, and to attempt to do so is an impudent interference
with the most fundamental human privilege.
Fourth. We want the laws enforced against rich as well as poor;
against capitalist 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 Congress to take
charge of Congressional elections. We want the Fourteenth Amendment
carried out to the letter and every state disfranchised in Congress
which attempts to disfranchise 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...to suffrage conditions in 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 ought to be. We want
the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in
the South. Either the United States will destroy ignorance, or
ignorance will destroy the United States.
And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe
in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily
education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We
want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be,
and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate
black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply
for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think,
to aspire.
These are some of the chief things which we want. How shall we
get them? By voting where we may vote, by persistent, unceasing
agitation, by hammering at the truth, by sacrifice and work.
We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence
of the raid nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous
of the mob, but we do believe in John Brown, in that incarnate
spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice
money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of right. And
here on the scene of John Brown's martyrdom, we reconsecrate ourselves,
our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race
which John Brown died to make free.
Our enemies, triumphant for the present, are fighting the stars
in their courses. Justice and humanity must prevail. We live to
tell these dark brothers of ours--scattered in counsel, wavering,
and weak--that no bribe of money or notoriety, no promise of wealth
or fame, is worth the surrender of a people's manhood or the loss
of a man's self-respect. We refuse to surrender the leadership
of this race to cowards and trucklers. We are men; we will be
treated as men. On this rock we have planted our banners. We will
never give up, though the trump of doom finds us still fighting.
And we shall win! The past promised it. The present foretells
it. Thank God for John Brown. Thank God for Garrison and Douglass,
Sumner and Phillips, Nat Turner and Robert Gould Shaw, and all
the hallowed dead who died for freedom. Thank God for all those
today, few though their voices be, who have not forgotten the
divine brotherhood of all men, white and black, rich and poor,
fortunate and unfortunate.
We appeal to the young men and women of this nation, to those
whose nostrils are not yet befouled by greed and snobbery and
racial narrowness: Stand up for the right, prove yourselves worthy
of your heritage and, whether born North or South, dare to treat
men as men. Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten-million foreigners
into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten-million
Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than
their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?
Courage, brothers! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing.
All across the skies sit signs of promise! [DuBois points skyward.]
The Slav is rising in his might, the yellow millions are tasting
liberty, the black Africans are writhing toward the light, and
everywhere the laborer, with ballot in his hand, is voting open
the gates of opportunity and peace.
The morning breaks over blood-stained hills. We must not falter,
we may not shrink.
Above are the everlasting stars.
Churchill's
'Do Your Worst...'
Luther's 95 Theses
I
have a dream...
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