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Buffalo and Erie County have played important roles in advancing human rights in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of those advances have had national and international significance. Now on view at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Pan-Am building is a key exhibit, "On the Road to Freedom", which documents our region’s human rights struggles and achievements as it celebrates the centennial of the founding of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights convocation in 1905 which preceded and later merged with the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A heritage of quiet heroics and strident battles to shape civil and human rights exists in Western New York. A northern international border location set the stage for important stops on the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, social reformers-- often motivated by religion—flourished in Western New York as early as the 1830s. National leaders of the day met here to organize communities in support of their agendas, such as when Frederick Douglass debated Reverend Henry Garnet over how militant the resistance to slavery ought to be.
Not advancing human rights, Millard Fillmore as 13th President of the United States signed the Compromise of 1850, with a stronger Fugitive Slave Law which required citizens of non-slave states to help capture runaways living among them.
Mary Burnett Talbert and her husband, Buffalonian William Talbert, actively battled racism in this community and nationally. She had lived here a decade when the Pan American Exposition of l901 excluded the African American citizens in its planning and focused on simplistic negative portrayals of all people of color. Mary Talbert belonged to The Phyllis Wheatley Club of Buffalo which did succeed in getting the Paris Exposition Negro Exhibit into the Exposition. After a lifetime of activism, including being vice-president of the NAACP, chairperson of the Anti-lynching Committee of the United States, president of the Frederick Douglass Memorial, and work in the Red Cross in France during World War I, the NAACP awarded her its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. The 1922 medal is on view in this exhibit.
The Declaration of Principles of the Niagara Movement advocated the abolition of all forms of racial discrimination. By the 1960s in America many of its demands were yet to be met. Bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, Sit-ins and civil rights marches often met with harsh opposition. Movements for equal rights ran side by side with protest for the environment and against the War in Vietnam, and Buffalo was in the thick of agitation and protest.
As the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional, Buffalo’s Board of Education introduced policies which reinforced it. From the mid 1960s to early 1970s emotions ran high in Buffalo as forces for and against racial integration clashed. Audio excerpts in the exhibit tell the struggle in the words of some of the key participants.
Violent street demonstrations erupted in June 1967 on the East side of the city; in 1970 the University at Buffalo was a lightning rod for protests against the Vietnam War, Defense Department research and military recruitment on campus. In U.S. District Court, Federal Judge John T. Curtin presided over acrimonious lawsuits and ultimately made a landmark decision on "The Buffalo Plan" for magnet schools which served as a national model for desegregating schools and spared Buffalo some of the violence that occurred elsewhere.
Visit "On the Road to Freedom" for a revealing look into civil and human rights issues which continue into the twenty-first century.
To plan your visit, look here.
Attention Teachers Our newest Resource
Kit, On the Road to Freedom, is now available.
Details here.
This exhibit proudly sponsored by
