Black identity and Black protest in the antebellum North

Resource Information

The work Black identity and Black protest in the antebellum North represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Black identity and Black protest in the antebellum North

Statement of responsibility

Patrick Rael

Creator

• Rael, Patrick

Subject

• African Americans -- History -- To 1863
• African Americans -- Northeastern States -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
• African Americans -- Race identity -- Northeastern States
• African American leadership -- Northeastern States -- History -- 19th century
• Northeastern States -- Race relations
• Protest movements -- Northeastern States -- History -- 20th century
• Free African Americans -- Northeastern States | History -- 19th century

Language

eng

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 lesser-known 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

Cataloging source

DLC

Government publication

government publication level undetermined

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture