“Progressive” Encounters

Early Movements for Civil Rights in Georgia: Hard Fought Encounters and Exchange

Table from the Report of the Third Atlanta Conference, Rare Pamphlet Collection, E185.6 D84 1898

The Savannah Men’s Sunday Club

In April 1905, a group of Savannah’s black elite established a dual-natured activist organization – one part civil activism, one part protest – called the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club.  Professors of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth founded the club in order to discuss resolutions to local race issues that were steadily reflecting the Jim Crow and segregationist atmosphere pervading the South.  Savannah’s “Talented Tenth” set out to educate the populace on matters concerning public health, education, and enfranchisement through lecture series, church preachings, and publications in the Savannah Tribune, the city’s African-American newspaper.  They were also determined to bring their cause to the white citizens of Savannah through boycotts, demonstrations, and meetings with city officials.

 Down in GA, James S. Silva Collection, 1888 - 1910s, VM 2126.  This picture was taken near Savannah and exemplifies the conditions that groups such as the Savannah Men's Sunday Club hoped to change.

Savannah’s Sunday Club gave publicity to many of the state’s most promising black activists of the time such as W.E.B. du Bois and Henry Hugh Proctor.  The most instrumental individual in the club’s founding was Monroe Nathan Work, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s masters program in sociology, who brought with him a desire to educate both blacks and whites on the sub-standard quality of life plaguing African-Americans throughout the country.

The Niagara Movement in Georgia

During the organization of the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club, W.E.B. Du Bois contacted Monroe Work and requested that he endorse what was to become known as the Niagara Movement.  The movement provided an alternative to Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist stance and challenged Jim Crow law and racial violence through open action.

Du Bois, politically active in Georgia since taking a position at Atlanta University in 1897, also recruited (among others) Henry Hugh Proctor, an Atlanta pastor, and William Jefferson White, the radical publisher of the Georgia Baptist in Augusta.  Du Bois placed high regard on local “race men” to carry out the movement in their various communities and he obtained more active members from Georgia than from any other state.  These men had all been politically active in the past, and their experiences, when pooled together, established a solid network of activism throughout Georgia.  The movement proved short-lived, however, as the 1906 gubernatorial campaign became heated with racist rhetoric and eventually, racial violence.

Thomas Irwin to Governor-Elect Joseph Brown, 1909, Thomas B. Irwin Correspondence, 1889-1912, MS 418.  This letter demonstrates some of the obstacles facing black Georgians in the age of "progressivism" and the need for the Niagara Movement. 

The effectiveness of the Niagara Movement and the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club diminished in 1906 after the bloody Atlanta race riot and the subsequent cementing of Jim Crow law in Georgia.  Even in Savannah, where politicians were slow to adopt Jim Crow laws, the black community found themselves under new and intense pressure. Although black Savannahians boycotted the streetcar lines after their segregation in September 1906, costing the lines more than $50,000, the resolve of Southern whites proved too strong.  Many in the black community abandoned the Niagara movement after learning of the bloodshed in Atlanta.  They also witnessed the arrests of friends and family members on bogus charges throughout Savannah as white police responded to a general fear of black activism.

The Sunday Club continued to be active until 1911, but due to a lack of unity and apathy among many black elites it was much less a protest organization and more dedicated to civic improvements and accommodationism.  Even Monroe Work was of two minds.  Similar to H.H. Proctor, he believed that W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were “complementary opposites.”  After the failure of protest in Savannah, Work moved into the Booker T. Washington camp, accepting a position at the Tuskegee Institute in 1908.  His duality found a voice in later writings through which Work gave two purposes to black education, one part Du Bois, one part Washington.

Teaching Tips:

Discuss the difference between the Washington and Du Bois “camps.”  Ask the students which line of thinking they prefer – or do they think, like Proctor and Work, that Washington and Du Bois were complementary opposites?

Visit the Atlanta Race Riot website at www.1906atlantaraceriot.org for tips on how to teach this significant event and for images to include in your lectures.

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