African-American Activism before the Civil War
Title | African-American Activism before the Civil War PDF eBook |
Author | Patrick Rael |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 310 |
Release | 2008 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780203930441 |
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.
Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
Title | Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction PDF eBook |
Author | Kate Masur |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Total Pages | 480 |
Release | 2021-03-23 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1324005947 |
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.
Speak Now Against The Day
Title | Speak Now Against The Day PDF eBook |
Author | John Egerton |
Publisher | Knopf |
Total Pages | 1173 |
Release | 2013-08-28 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0307834573 |
Speak Now Against the Day is the astonishing, little-known story of the Southerners who, in the generation before the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, challenged the validity of a white ruling class and a “separate but equal” division of the races. The voices of the dissenters, although present throughout the South’s troubled history, grew louder with Roosevelt’s election in 1932. An increasing number of men and women who grappled daily with the economic and social woes of the South began forcefully and courageously to speak and to work toward the day when the South—and the nation—would deliver on the historic promises in the country’s founding documents. This is the story of those brave prophets—thhe ministers, writers, educators, journalists, social activists, union members, and politicians, black and white, who pointed the way to higher ground. Published forty years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the Supreme Court, this compelling book is not only a rich trove of forgotten history—it also speaks profoundly to us in the context of today’s continuing racial and social conflict.
Antebellum Black Activists
Title | Antebellum Black Activists PDF eBook |
Author | R. J. Young |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 169 |
Release | 2021-10-28 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1000525929 |
First published in 1996. In this volume the author has collected several published works to explore the ideas of manhood in America, Sojourner Truth, ties of ordinary blacks to those still in slavery and a study of the Northern African American community; new information on black activities in Canada and begins with an essay on the five elements of black community activity before the Civil War: churches, newspapers, conventions, organizations, and emigration which looks at of these "platforms for change" going through developmental stages from experimentation, adjustment and reaching maturity in the 1850’s.
African American Activists
Title | African American Activists PDF eBook |
Author | Carol Ellis |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 64 |
Release | 2014-09-02 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1422292770 |
The Civil War finally ended slavery in the United States in 1865. But blacks didn't suddenly enjoy all the rights other Americans took for granted. They had to struggle against racism and discrimination to claim those rights. African-American Activists traces that generations-long struggle. In this book, you'll meet early activists like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, who had very different ideas about how blacks should take their place in American society. You'll read about activists who worked for integration and equality under the law during the civil rights movement, including Rosa Parks and John Lewis. And you'll learn how a new generation of African-American activists, such as Majora Carter and Van Jones, continue to work for a better society today.
Colored Travelers
Title | Colored Travelers PDF eBook |
Author | Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Total Pages | 237 |
Release | 2016-10-13 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1469628589 |
Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. These were "colored travelers," activists who relied on steamships, stagecoaches, and railroads to expand their networks and to fight slavery and racism. They refused to ride in "Jim Crow" railroad cars, fought for the right to hold a U.S. passport (and citizenship), and during their transatlantic voyages, demonstrated their radical abolitionism. By focusing on the myriad strategies of black protest, including the assertions of gendered freedom and citizenship, this book tells the story of how the basic act of traveling emerged as a front line in the battle for African American equal rights before the Civil War. Drawing on exhaustive research from U.S. and British newspapers, journals, narratives, and letters, as well as firsthand accounts of such figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown, Pryor illustrates how, in the quest for citizenship, colored travelers constructed ideas about respectability and challenged racist ideologies that made black mobility a crime.
Stokely
Title | Stokely PDF eBook |
Author | Peniel E. Joseph |
Publisher | Civitas Books |
Total Pages | 426 |
Release | 2014-03-04 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0465080480 |
From the author of The Sword and the Shield, this definitive biography of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael offers "an unflinching look at an unflinching man" (Daily Beast). Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century. A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.