uch. Sometimes also there was something in his illustrations of the
effects of current methods of education that provoked reply. Those
who were of the opposition, however, were not at first united and
constructive, and in their utterances they sometimes offended by
harshness of tone. Dr. Washington himself said of the extremists in this
group that they frequently understood theories but not things; that in
college they gave little thought to preparing for any definite task in
the world, but started out with the idea of preparing themselves to
solve the race problem; and that many of them made a business of keeping
the troubles, wrongs, and hardships of the Negro race before the
public.[1] There was ample ground for this criticism. More and more,
however, the opposition gained force; the _Guardian_, a weekly paper
edited in Boston by Monroe Trotter, was particularly outspoken, and in
Boston the real climax came in 1903 in an endeavor to break up a meeting
at which Dr. Washington was to speak. Then, beginning in January, 1904,
the _Voice of the Negro_, a magazine published in Atlanta for three
years, definitely helped toward the cultivation of racial ideals.
Publication of the periodical became irregular after the Atlanta
Massacre, and it finally expired in 1907. Some of the articles dealt
with older and more philosophical themes, but there were also bright and
illuminating studies in education and other social topics, as well as a
strong stand on political issues. The _Colored American_, published in
Boston just a few years before the _Voice_ began to appear, also did
inspiring work. Various local or state organizations, moreover, from
time to time showed the virtue of cooeperation; thus the Georgia Equal
Rights Convention, assembled in Macon in February, 1906, at the call of
William J. White, the veteran editor of the _Georgia Baptist_, brought
together representative men from all over the state and considered such
topics as the unequal division of school taxes, the deprivation of the
jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In
1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara
Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and
criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the
abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the
recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present
creed, the recognitio