Abstract
It may seem obvious that talk and debate are necessary precursors of social movement mobilization, but Angela Jones makes a compelling case that movement scholars are too often silent on such issues. Like other recent analysts of the Civil Rights Movement, Jones argues for a “long history,” one that recognizes the contributions of precursor leaders and movements to the usual story centered on the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Her book, African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement, seeks to locate the Niagara Movement as a key, but heretofore largely forgotten, player in that history—particularly in its role as a catalyst for instigating a new public sphere focused on equal rights, political power, and higher education for African Americans.
Jones suggests that our knowledge of the Niagara Movement is overshadowed by the towering figure of W.E.B. Du Bois and the assumption that this short-lived movement was a failure. She promulgates a broader view, widening our vision to take in neglected movement figures, including women, who occupied key roles in the movement via black newspaper outlets (the “race press”) around the country. Using newspapers and archival data as her primary source material, she also attempts to show how the movement initiated a robust public debate against Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach to civil rights.
To be sure, Du Bois is a key figure for Niagara just as Martin Luther King, Jr. was for the later mobilization phase of the movement. But Jones shifts some of the attention away from him and toward other oft-forgotten figures, both in the text itself and in the useful collective biography in the appendix. Jesse Max Barber, Alonzo Herndon, L.M. Hershaw, and William Monroe Trotter are just a few of the key figures discussed and analyzed. Together, this group illustrates the breadth of support that Niagara was able to muster around the eastern, midwestern, and southern regions of the United States. Moreover, because of their key positions as owners and writers in the race press, these figures, through debates among themselves and with Washingtonians and the white press, brought forth an alternative public sphere. The effects of this public sphere were significant not just in opposing Washington’s efforts to humble black ambitions and tolerate virulent and ever-present white racism, but in instituting broad public claims for equal rights, political action, and cultural pride and uplift and for providing platforms for emerging leaders and agendas. Moreover, Jones challenges notions that the Niagara movement completely excluded women, noting its positions in favor of female suffrage and the increasingly prominent roles played by women in the movement after 1906.
Far from being a failed movement and mere footnote as an organization formed by Du Bois and a precursor to the NAACP, Jones suggests that the movement made important contributions in its own right to what later became known as the Civil Rights Movement. Niagarans incubated central ideas and activist agendas that would later become front and center, first via the NAACP and later for the mass mobilization phase of the movement. The talk and debate did not often lead to large demonstrations and mass public support, Jones admits, but such facts do not make the accomplishments of the Niagara movement any less important in the long run. In addition to these empirical insights into the origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Jones asserts that such attention opens up a broad new set of factors for movement scholars to consider as they try to understand how movements emerge.
This latter effort is consonant with the cultural and social-psychological turn in the sociology of social movements over the past decade and more. The fact that Jones does not make more of this connection indicates some of the weaknesses of the book in its handling of social movement theory. The book is strongest in telling us untold or misapprehended history and in using its empirical bases to suggest important lacunae within the larger literature on movements. It is weaker in filling those lacunae and, in particular, at advancing new tools and modes of conceptual and theoretical analysis of movement emergence, framing, and the public sphere that are useful beyond her own case. In that sense, those less interested in the Civil Rights Movement itself than in looking for advances in these areas may be disappointed and also quibble with some redundancies in the rhetorical structure of the book.
Still, the acid test for a book of this sort is whether it stimulates ideas—this book certainly does that. In addition to showing the fundamental importance of the formation of public spheres as crucial but neglected precursors of movement ferment and mobilization, Jones’ work suggests the need for greater attention to different phases of long-running movements such as this. Gloria Steinem has recently stated that most movements last at least a century if they are going to change society permanently and dramatically, thus buttressing Jones’ view of the “long” movement. There may be a case for an even longer view, in which the Niagara Movement and the early years of the NAACP are understood as an abeyance period of the movement, an essential phase between two periods of mass mobilization, the first lesser known and growing out of emancipation and running into the 1890s, and the second the more well-known and conventionally understood mobilizations of 1950 and thereafter.
I also found myself wanting to know more about the role of social class and of region in this movement. Other readers, be they movement scholars or those interested in the history of civil rights struggles, will no doubt find themselves responding to or provoked by some different nuance. Such is the richness of this book that it could well be the starting point for other important investigations.