NAACP nurtured in Amenia

By John Quinn
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

Amenia, the small town in eastern Dutchess County, played an early and important role in the blacks’ ‘‘fight for freedom,’’ as poet and writer Langston Hughes titled his story of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The ferment and passion of sit-ins, marches and nonviolent resistance to often violent segregation made many of the latter day civil rights events more dramatic and perhaps more memorable than the Amenia conference.

But they were no more important or long-lasting in their impact. For after this three-day gathering in Amenia, many of the differences among black leaders were resolved. And the NAACP emerged as the standard bearer of civil rights.

It marked a watershed in the fight for equality. It became evident in early court successes, political advances and a lobbying and propaganda effort that followed a phased and deliberate course.

Discussing the legal cases carried through the courts by the NAACP, Arthur Spingarn, 27-year chairman of the NAACP’s legal committee, once noted: ‘‘The way to stop segregation is through court action. The protest in Montgomery over bus segregation wasn’t won by the marchers but by a Supreme Court decision. It was magnificent for those people to suffer for their rights, but they finally won their rights by court decision.’’

There were battles still to be fought over issues decided in court but some 30 Supreme Court decisions culminating in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decree steadily advanced the cause of equal rights for American blacks.

Thurgood Marshall, later to be the first black on the Supreme Court, argued the school segregation case during his nearly 20 years as a lead attorney for the NAACP.

It was in the summer of 1916 on the shores of Troutbeck Lake in Amenia when black leaders of all factions met to discuss their divergent views and attempt to agree on principles to guide their efforts to better race relations in the United States. Joel Spingarn, distinguished professor of literature at Columbia University, chairman of the board of the fledgling NAACP, had extended invitations to several hundred black and white leaders concerned with the problem of racial inequality.

A range of guests

Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP and editor of The Crisis, fiery voice of the association, wrote personal notes urging participation in what would become known as the Amenia Conference.

Some 50 prominent men and women accepted the invitation at the summer home of Spingarn and his wife, Amy. Those attending ranged from Southern followers of the ‘‘gradualism’’ of educator Booker T. Washington, who had died the year before, to those considered the extreme black militants, such as DuBois himself. In 1905, the militants’ “thunder and lightning’’ opposition to racial accommodation expressed in the Niagara Movement had planted the seed of the NAACP to be formed in 1909. Between these two factions there had been disagreement and often bitterness. Previous attempts to resolve these differences had been unsuccessful. Conceived by the NAACP as an independent gathering of all opinions, the conference opened Aug. 26 in the peace and quiet of the fields around the lake.

The conferees slept on cots with tent mates of often opposing views. There was time for tennis, swimming and boating, but the three days were largely spent in free and open discussion of ‘‘the problem’’ of racial inequality — education, politics and segregation in the South.

Writing about the Amenia conference 10 years later, DuBois noted that despite the vast differences of opinion, goodwill and a common purpose prevailed throughout the three days. He pointed out that everybody had a chance to express his or her views without oratory or acrimony. DuBois wrote: ‘‘There was present a pervading and saving sense of humor that laughed the poseur straight off the rostrum.’’

When the conference adjourned, a unity of liberal thought among progressive blacks and whites had been achieved. Principles agreed to at Troutbeck helped to heal the split that had encumbered the struggle for equal rights. As DuBois said, ‘‘The Amenia conference in reality marked the end of an era and the beginning.’’

He concluded: ‘‘How appropriate that as tremendous a thing should have taken place in the midst of so much quiet and beauty there at Troutbeck ... a place of poets and fishermen, of dreamers and farmers, a place far apart and away from the bustle of the world and the centers of activity ... it was all particularly appropriate and those who in the future write the history of the way in which the American Negro became a man must not forget this event and landmark in 1916.’’

With the country joining the Great War in Europe, any dreams of a similar gathering the following year were forgotten. And while the history of the NAACP has not always been without dissension and discord, the Amenia conference and the young people who were there, such as Walter White, William Pickens and Ralph Bunche, have left indelible marks on the road to racial equality.

Former newspaperman John Quinn is a resident of Amenia and a member of the Sharon (Conn.) Historical Society.