Politics, Rights, and Spatiality in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Address to the Country” (1906).

Williams, Robert W.

Organized in 1905, the Niagara Movement opposed racial discrimination in the U.S.A. and promoted its goals and means for racial uplift. During its second meeting in 1906 at Harpers Ferry, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote the “Address to the Country,” which set forth a series of demands for political and civil rights, and also called for Congressional intervention to secure those rights. This paper explores the critical spatiality of race, politics, and rights that inheres within the “Address” so that one can better understand the nationalizing strategy advocated by the Niagara Movement. Such a strategy implicated spatiality both as an end goal that supported civil and political rights via dismantling segregation and other discriminatory spatial structures, and also as a means—a politics of scale—that expanded the scope of political struggles to national arenas.

NIAGARA Movement; RACE discrimination; CIVIL rights; POLITICAL rights; HUMAN rights

Journal of African American Studies, 2010, Vol 14, Issue 3, p337

1559-1646

Academic Journal

10.1007/s12111-009-9104-7