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CALL FOR PAPERS

Fighting for Notice: A Hundred Years Later, Commemorating the 1907 Boston Meeting of the Niagara Movement
       October 16-17, 2007

As part of the centennial celebration of the 1907 meeting of the Niagara Movement in Boston, the William Monroe Trotter Institute at UMASS Boston, along with the NAACP, is sponsoring a two-day, four-panel symposium (October 16-17), organized around the topic: Strong Men, Strong Women: Fighting for Their Rights. 

The first panel, Civil War to Civil Rights welcomes papers that contextualize the challenges that blacks faced in the struggle to be treated as equals on the field.  Shortly after the men of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments were mustered, they learned that they were going to be paid on a lesser scale, as laborers, not as soldiers.  They wrote to the President, making him aware of their plight, and they refused, for over a year, to accept wages until all black soldiers were paid at a commensurate rate.  Focus Question: In what way(s) did the Civil War prepare the terrain for civil rights?

The second panel, The Decade that Produced Niagara and the NAACP invites papers on a convulsive decade lived against a backdrop of riots, one that Trotter initiated in a Boston Church in 1903 against Booker T. Washington, one in Atlanta in 1906 that galvanized a young Walter White, and one in Springfield in 1908, which included the destruction of black businesses, homes, and the lynching of an 84-year black man.  Focus Question: To what extent did the first decade of the century forecast the conflicts ahead?   

The third panel, Activism in the Women’s Era looks at the role of African American women from the 1890s through the First World War.  Before the suffrage movement, black women were fighting oppression, writing theoretical tracts, and publishing their own newspapers. One such woman, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin edited the Woman’s Era from 1890 to 1897.  The 1907 meeting of the Niagara Movement in Boston was the first time that black women voted on questions that included the race as a whole.  Focus Question: Why is there still so much anonymity associated with the black women advocates of this time, with special emphasis given to those from Massachusetts?

The fourth panel, Art Takes Part explores the creative arts and how they manifested the struggle for rights.  Horace Pippin, a veteran of the First World War, came back paralyzed, unable to hold a paint brush in his right hand.  In time, he learned to use his left as a guide, evidence of his resilient spirit.  Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Mary Burrill, among others, wrote plays before 1920 that denounced the lynching epidemic that had grabbed hold of the American psyche.  Focus Question: What narratives and themes did artists, literary, visual, cinematic, construct as they reflected on the times from the Civil War to the War to End All War, as WWI was described?

Proposal deadline: September 1, 2007
Abstracts: 500 words
Send to:     Barbara Lewis, Trotter Institute, barbara.lewis@umb.edu

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