Black identity & Black protest in the antebellum North / Patrick Rael.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rael, Patrick.

Series:

John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture

The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Race identity--Northeastern States.

African Americans.

African Americans--Northeastern States--Intellectual life--19th century.

African Americans--History--To 1863.

History.

Free African Americans--Northeastern States--History--19th century.

Free African Americans.

Race relations.

Protest movements.

African American leadership.

Intellectual life.

African Americans--Race identity.

Northeastern States.

African American leadership--Northeastern States--History--19th century.

Protest movements--Northeastern States--History--20th century.

Northeastern States--Race relations.

Physical Description:

xii, 421 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Other Title:

Black identity and Black protest in the antebellum North

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2002]

Summary:

Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany -- these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesserknown black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today.

Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

Contents:

Introduction: Of Men, Lions, and History 1

1 A Different Measure of Oppression: Leadership and Identity in the Black North 12

2 Besieged by Freedom's Army: Antislavery Celebrations and Black Activism 54

3 The Sign of Things: The "Names Controversy" and Black Identity 82

4 Discipline of the Heart, Discipline of the Mind: The Sources of Black Social Thought 118

5 Slaves to a Wicked Public Sentiment: Black Respectability and the Response to Prejudice 157

6 A Nation Out of a Nation: Black Nationalism as Nationalism 209

7 This Temple of Liberty: Black Racialism and American Identity 237

Conclusion: Black Protest and the Continuing Revolution 279.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [351]-407) and index.

ISBN:

0807826383

0807849677

OCLC:

46343179