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African-American Activism before the Civil War

The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North

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African-American Activism before the Civil War is the first collection of scholarship on the role of African Americans in the struggle for racial equality in the northern states before the Civil War. Many of these essays are already known as classics in the field, and others are well on their way to becoming definitive in a still-evolving field. Here, in one place for the first time, anchored by a comprehensive, analytical introduction discussing the historiography of antebellum black activism, the best scholarship on this crucial group of African American activists can finally be studied together.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface by Mia Bay

Introduction, by Patrick Rael

Chapter 1: "Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist", Leon Litwack

Chapter 2: "Black Power—The Debate in 1840", Jane H. Pease, William H. Pease

Chapter 3: "Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-1850", Frederick Cooper

Chapter 4: "Black History’s Antebellum Origins", Benjamin Quarles

Chapter 5: "Since They Got Those Separate Churches: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia", Emma Jones Lapsansky

Chapter 6: "Interpreting Early Black Ideology: A Reappraisal of Historical Consensus", George A. Levesque

Chapter 7: "Afro-American Identity: Reflections on the Pre-Civil War Era", Ernest Allen, Jr.

Chapter 8: "Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks," James Oliver Horton

Chapter 9: "The Political Significance of Slave Resistance", James Oakes

Chapter 10: "It was a Proud Day: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741-1834", Shane White

Chapter 11: "Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands: Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America", Albert Raboteau

Chapter 12: "The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840", James Brewer Stewart

Chapter 13: "From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points’: The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City," Leslie M. Harris

Chapter 14: "The Redeemer Race and the Angry Saxon: Race, Gender, and White People in Antebellum Black Ethnology," Mia Bay

Chapter 15: "The Market Revolution and Market Values in Antebellum Black Protest Thought", Patrick Rael

For Further Reading

Author/Editor Biography

Patrick Rael is Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College, Maine. He is the author of Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860 (Routledge).