Du Bois was now based in New York as editor of the Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, a monthly periodical concerned with matters involving people of African descent. Booker T. Washington was still seen as representing black America but as Du Bois commented, his leadership had seen nine states introduce railway segregation and six disenfranchise black people. Every year hundreds were being lynched and the North had little interest in the affairs of the old slave states.

Coleridge-Taylor liked the Washingtons and Du Bois. He would have seen reports in British newspapers describing riots in Springfield, Illinois, in mid-August 1908. 2,000 blacks fled; two were lynched; six were shot. Springfield was the birth town of Abraham Lincoln and 1908 was his centenary so this anti-black violence was deeply symbolic. This triggered the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Involved almost from the start were three men the composer knew from 1900: William Scarborough, Du Bois and Bishop Walters. Du Bois was director of publicity and research, and edited the Crisis from November 1910.

Booker T. Washington was in England that year during an extensive European tour that took him to Prague, Berlin, Naples, Copenhagen, Budapest and Vienna.