After Reconstruction: Problems of African Americans in the South

Brief History of African American Congresses

The African American convention movement dates back to 1830, when 40 free black delegates from eight states met in Philadelphia to plan a concerted response to the growing efforts of the American Colonization Society to encourage free African Americans in northern cities to "remove" to Africa. The convention dealt with the immediate crisis in Cincinnati, supporting the emigration to Canada of about a thousand blacks who could not pay the $500 bond newly required of black residents. This group also established a precedent for holding national assemblies to discuss matters of concern for African Americans. State and national conventions or assemblies met at irregular intervals, mostly in northern locations, over the next thirty-five years until the end of the Civil War. Participants usually included leading African American Ministers, editors, educators, and business owners. Discussions centered on slavery, African colonization, morality, self-help, education, economic advancement and equality of opportunity.

National, state, and regional conventions continued to meet irregularly, both in the north and the south during the post-Civil War period. Convention themes emphasized race pride, self-help, racial solidarity and economic development and land acquisition. In reaction to the worsening conditions for African Americans during the Jim Crow era, regional conventions became more frequent and helped to develop the grass-roots framework from which several national organizations of agitation and protest emerged in the last decade of the century. T. Thomas Fortune organized the National Afro-American League in 1890 to combat disenfranchisement, lynching and other injustices and to encourage separate black businesses. Both the National Association of Colored Men and the National Association of Colored Women were established in 1896. The League was revived as the National Afro-American Council in 1898.

The Constitution of the National Afro-American Council stated the following objectives for the organization:

1. To investigate and make an impartial report of all Lynchings and other outrages perpetrated upon American citizens.

2. To assist in testing the constitutionality of laws which are made for the express purpose of oppressing the Afro-American.

3. To promote the work of securing legislation which in the individual States shall secure to all citizens the rights guaranteed them by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

4. To aid in the work of Prison Reform.

5. To recommend a healthy migration from terror-ridden sections of our land to States where law is respected and maintained.

6. To encourage both industrial and higher education.

7. To promote business enterprises among the people.

8. To educate sentiment on all lines that specially affect our race.

9. To inaugurate and promote plans for the moral elevation of the Afro-American people.

10. To urge the appropriation for School Funds by the Federal Government to provide education for citizens who are denied school privileges by discriminating State laws.

The Afro-American Council remained active until 1906. Its platform advocated civil rights, and foreshadowed the goals of the Niagara Movement (1905), founded in part by W.E.B. Du Bois. The Niagara Movement later led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1910).

Bibliography

Bell, Howard H., ed. Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830-1864. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Foner, Philip S. and Walker, George e. Walker, eds. Proceedings of the Black National and State conventions, 1865-1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Kelley, Robin D.G. and Lewis, Earl, eds. The Young Oxford History of African Americans, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. USA: University of Michigan Press, 1991.