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.

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).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD (By James Brewer Stewart)

INTRODUCTION

1. Leon F. Litwack, The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist
2. Jane H. Pease; William H. Pease, Black Power - The Debate in 1840
3. Frederick Cooper, Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-1850
4. Benjamin Quarles, Black History's Antebellum Origins
5. Emma Jones Lapsansky, 'Since They Got Those Separate Churches': Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia
6. George A. Levesque, Interpreting Early Black Ideology: A Reappraisal of Historical Consensus
7. Ernest Allen, Jr., Afro-American Identity: Reflections on the Pre-Civil War Era
8. James Oliver Horton, Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks
9. James Oakes, The Political Significance of Slave Resistance
10. Albert J. Raboteau, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands': Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America
11. James Brewer Stewart, The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840
12. Leslie M. Harris, From Abolitionist Amalgamators to 'Rulers of the Five Points': The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City
13. Patrick Rael, The Market Revolution and Market Values in Antebellum Black Protest Thought

Index