Equal Rights League meets in Washington: 1873

Delegates to the National Equal Rights League (NERL) convention held December 9, 1873 at Metzerott Hall at 925 Pennsylvania Avenue NW pose in front of the building and on the balcony.

The Pennsylvania branch of the NERL issued a convention call upon the introduction into Congress of a civil rights bill by Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.). The bill had been written in part by NERL past president John Mercer Langston.

Sumner’s bill, first introduced in 1870, would have banned discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants and other places of business as well as schools.

The NERL convention of 1873 passed a resolution that urged Congress to pass a civil rights bill, “with such penalties as shall teach humanity and the imbruted, and compel the tyrant to loose his hold on the poor, and still forever the assumptions based alone on color.”

The bill did not pass until 1875 after being stripped of the protection for schools and was the last major civil rights bill of the Reconstruction Era. It was never enforced by President Ulysses Grant nor his successors and was ultimately gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Court held the Equal Protection Clause within the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination by the state and local government, but it does not give the federal government the power to prohibit discrimination by private individuals and organizations. The Court also held that the Thirteenth Amendment was meant to eliminate "the badge of slavery," but not to prohibit racial discrimination in public accommodations.

It would take until 1964 to pass a similar law, this time citing powers to regulate under the Commerce Clause.

National Equal Rights League:

On October 4, 1864, 150 black men representing seventeen states and Washington, D.C., assembled in Syracuse, New York, for the National Convention of Colored Men.

Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man who had become a leader in the abolitionist movement, opened the convention by proclaiming, “We are here to promote the freedom, progress, and perfect enfranchisement of the entire colored people of the United States.”

Although the Civil War did not end for another six months, historians have referred to this four-day gathering as “the first Reconstruction convention.”

In its Declaration of Wrongs and Rights, convention members summarized the rights they believed necessary to ensure freedom, progress, and meaningful citizenship:

“The right to be heard in Congress[;] the right to respect; that due attention should be given to our needs; that proper rewards should be given for our services, and that the immunities and privileges of all other citizens and defenders of the nation’s honor should be conceded to us.”

Several resolutions were passed endorsing the abolition of slavery, legal equality regardless of color or race, and black manhood suffrage. The members also wrote their own constitution and founded the National Equal Rights League (NERL), and its subsidiary state Equal Rights Leagues.

Some of the most prominent members were Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, its first president.

The first annual meeting of the League took place in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19-21, 1865.

The NERL used the susu economics practices of its many West Indies immigrant members to fund its activities, which included the establishment of self-sufficient black communities (Black Wall Streets) throughout the U.S. The work of the membership of the NERL created such other organizations as the National Negro Business League, the National Negro Bar Association, and the Pan-African Conference.

The League also pursued a legislation in its initial years, but after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1877 that marked the end of the Reconstruction Era, the NERL pursued a legal strategy, finding the courts more amenable to civil rights issues than state legislatures or Congress.

The NERL also had significant international influence. Its leadership was received by heads of state, and they even had a delegate attend the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The two best-known leaders of the organization were John Mercer Langston and William Monroe Trotter.

Other notable members included Madam C.J. Walker, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (who founded its Anti-Lynching Bureau), Mary Church Terrell, Marcus Garvey, Octavius V. Catto, Charles Lewis Reason, John Rock, William Cooper Nell, Moses Dickson, and Frederick Douglass.

League members participated in the 1905 Niagara Movement that sought to chart a different path than Booker T. Washington’s narrow focus on self-help.

William Monroe Trotter revitalized the NERL in 1908. Those who were unable to accept the principles of the NAACP had as an alternative the NERL. Trotter and his followers, known as Trotterites, did not fully embrace the NAACP.

The two organizations also competed with each other for members. The NAACP, with its moderate approach and acceptance of white people as members, grew in importance and membership numbers.

Trotter, however, employed more confrontational tactics. He openly criticized Republican William Howard Taft’s election to the presidency, attacked President Woodrow Wilson’s racial policies, and met with Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge to attack the federal government’s racial practices.

The NERL led the fight against the film Birth of a Nation in 1915, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and helped culturally reinforce the burgeoning Jim Crow. The film was screened in the White House by President Wilson.

The league folded in the early 1920s after Trotter was unsuccessful in his aim to form a relationship among the NERL, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association movement, and the African Blood Brotherhood, a secretive armed self-defense black group led by Cyril Briggs.

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmR9jBvk

Photo by W. Ogilvie. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19580 (digital file from original item) LC-USZ62-68959 (b&w film copy neg.)

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Taken on: December 9, 1873

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Sets appears in: • The fight for rights: 1865-1900

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