Mary Burnett Talbert

“The hour has come in America for every woman, white and black, to save the name of her beloved country from shame by demanding that the barbarous custom of lynching and burning at the stake be stopped now and forever."

Mary Burnett Talbert was born September 18, 1866 in Oberlin, Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College in 1886 with a degree in literature. She taught at Bethel University in Little Rock for one year and then became assistant prinicipal of  Little Rock's Union High School, the first African American woman in the country to be an assistant principal.

In 1891 she married William Talbert and moved with him to his home town of Buffalo. She was a founding member of Buffalo's Phyllis Wheatley Club in 1899, the city's first affiliate with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which organized efforts to include an African American exhibit in the Buffalo's Pan American Exhibition of 1901 and to protest a plantation exhibit.

Meetings to organize the Niagara Movement were held in Talbert's home in 1905. She was also a founding member of the NAACP in 1909, forming a Buffalo chapter the next year and later serving as a national board member and anti-lynching committee chair. She was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1921, the first woman to receive this honor.

Talbert also worked to stop lynchings through the NACWC, which she served as national president from 1916 to 1920. During this time she was a delegate to the International Council of Women in Norway, and spoke throughout Europe about the conditions facing African Americans in the United States. Other priorities of the NACWC under her leadership were women's suffrage, prison reform, and restoration of the Frederick Douglass Home.

In addition to public speaking, Talbert wrote essays on a variety of topics, including the Achievements of African Americans in Twentieth Century Negro Literature. She died on October 15, 1923 at the age of 57.

Niagara Movement

"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 accomplishment."  ~ from Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles

The Niagara Movement began with a group of 29 African American men led by W. E. B. DuBois who met in Fort Erie, Ontario on July 11, 1905. Other founders include William Monroe Trotter, Frederick McGhee and C E Bentley. There are claims that the group met in Canada because they were denied accommodations in neighboring Buffalo, but it is more likely that they wanted a more secluded spot to gather or were unable to find space due to an Elks' convention. Their purpose was to seek equality in housing, education, the judicial system, the military, employment, and other areas of life in which it was denied during the Jim Crow era. They stood in direct contrast to the gradualist and conciliatory views of Booker T. Washington as expressed in his 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech.

Meetings in subsequent years were held at historically significant sites such as Harper's Ferry, West Virginia; Faneuil Hall, Boston; and Oberlin, Ohio. (The first meeting place had been chosen because of the importance of Western New York in the Underground Railroad.) Although there were local civil rights victories, the group was never able to grow beyond about 200 members because of lack of funding and staff, as well as opposition by Washington and his supporters. 

Reaction to the Springfield Race Riots of 1908 galvanized white allies connected to the Niagara Movement, including Mary White Ovington, who had been invited to join. Ovington and others merged with the Niagara Movement to form the NAACP the following year. Dr. DuBois became the only African American member of the founding Board of Directors, and his leadership provided continuity between the two organizations. The Niagara Movement formally disbanded in 1911.