NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People) The beginnings of the NAACP are to be found in a
three‐day conference held from July 11 through 13 in Fort Erie,
Canada, in 1904. The twenty‐nine attendees, all Black
intellectuals, were gathered there by the activist W.E.B. Du
Bois to organize what would be known as the Niagara Movement.
Its purpose was to achieve the complete abolition of all forms
of racial discrimination and, somewhat ironically, the
segregation of schools. Also on the agenda were the increased
election of Blacks to political office and the enforcement of
Black voting rights in America. Among the other notable Blacks
present at the conference who became part of its five‐year
existence as an activist body were John Hope, J. Max Barber, and
William Monroe Trotter. Perhaps because of its insistence on
educational segregation, the Niagara Movement did not gain
popular acceptance, and so its membership and their goals
dissolved, and revived in the new movement for Black rights