<P> The Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter . It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and Niagara Falls, near Fort Erie, Ontario, was where the first meeting took place in July 1905 . The Niagara Movement was a call for opposition to racial segregation and disenfranchisement, and it was opposed to policies of accommodation and conciliation promoted by African - American leaders such as Booker T. Washington . </P> <P> During the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War, African Americans had an unprecedented level of civil freedom and civic participation, especially in the Southern United States . With the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s this began to change . By the 1890s many of the Southern states introduced laws that significantly restricted the political and civil rights of African Americans . All of them passed laws restricting voting rights, or making them significantly more difficult to exercise, and also passed laws requiring racially segregated facilities . These policies became entrenched when the United States Supreme Court in 1896 ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that law requiring "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional . </P>

What was the main goal of the niagara movement