African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North

by Rael; Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780415957274
• ISBN10: 0415957273
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-03-26
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

P Historians have long understood that racial oppression in American history was about more than slavery. On the eve of the Civil War, over five per cent of the nation's 4.5 million African Americans lived outside of bondage in the nominally 'free' states of the Union. These African Americans exercised a power in national discussions over slavery that far outstripped their number in the population. Their efforts at community building and radical protest were one force that helped bring the nation to the brink of Civil War, and ultimately led to the extinction of slavery. /P P /P P EM African-American Activism before the Civil War /EM is the first to gather together scholarly essays published from 1965 to the present on the role of African Americans and race in the struggle for 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 oneplace, anchored by a comprehensive, analytical introduction discussing the historiography of antebellum black activism, the best scholarship on this crucial minority of African American activists can now be studied together. /P

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist	p. 39
Black Power-The Debate in 1840	p. 50
Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-50	p. 58
Black History's Antebellum Origins	p. 78
"Since They Got Those Separate Churches": Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia	p. 100
Interpreting Early Black Ideology: A Reappraisal of Historical Consensus	p. 119
Afro-American Identity: Reflections on the Pre-Civil War Era	p. 134
Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks	p. 168
The Political Significance of Slave Resistance	p. 188
"Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands": Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America	p. 206
The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840	p. 220
From Abolitionist Amalgamators to "Rulers of the Five Points": The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City	p. 250
The Market Revolution and Market Values in Antebellum Black Protest Thought	p. 272
Permission Acknowledgments	p. 295
Index	p. 297
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