Author: National Equal Rights LeaguePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 66
Book Description
Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19, 20, and 21, 1865
Author: National Equal Rights LeaguePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 66
Book Description
The Fire of Freedom
Author: David S. CecelskiPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807835668
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
Examines the life of a former slave who became a radical abolitionist and Union spy, recruiting black soldiers for the North, fighting racism within the Union Army and much more.
America's First Black Socialist
Author: Nikki M. TaylorPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813140994
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
This authoritative biography chronicles the pioneering work of a nineteenth-century Black abolitionist and civil rights activist. Growing up in the free state of Ohio before the Civil War, Peter H. Clark dedicated himself to the abolitionist cause. In pursuit of equal citizenship for African Americans, Clark was at various times a loyal supporter of the Republican Party, and an advocate for the Democrats, and the country's first black socialist. Clark led the fight for African Americans' access to Ohio's public schools and became the first black principal in the state. America's First Black Socialist draws upon speeches, correspondence, and outside commentary to provide a balanced account of this influential yet neglected figure. Charting Clark's changing allegiances and ideologies from the antebellum era through the 1920s, this comprehensive biography illuminates the life and legacy of an important activist while also highlighting the black radical tradition that helped democratize America.
Fighting for Citizenship
Author: Brian TaylorPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war's most important results.
Race and Rights
Author: Dana Elizabeth WeinerPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609090721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
In the Old Northwest from 1830 to 1870, a bold set of activists battled slavery and racial prejudice. This book is about their expansive efforts to eradicate southern slavery and its local influence in the contentious milieu of four new states carved out of the Northwest Territory: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. While the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the region in 1787, in reality both it and racism continued to exert strong influence in the Old Northwest, as seen in the race-based limitations of civil liberties there. Indeed, these states comprised the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America, in a time when race's social meaning was deeply infused into all aspects of Americans' lives, and when people struggled to establish political consensus. Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists from a range of institutional bases crossed racial lines as they battled to expand African American rights in this region. Whether they were antislavery lecturers, journalists, or African American leaders of the Black Convention Movement, women or men, they formed associations, wrote publicly to denounce their local racial climate, and gave controversial lectures. In the process, they discovered that they had to fight for their own right to advocate for others. This bracing new history by Dana Elizabeth Weiner is thus not only a history of activism, but also a history of how Old Northwest reformers understood the law and shaped new conceptions of justice and civil liberties. The newest addition to the Mellon-sponsored Early American Places Series, Race and Rights will be a much-welcomed contribution to the study of race and social activism in nineteenth-century America.
Remaking the Republic
Author: Christopher James BonnerPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government." Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
The African American Electorate
Author: Hanes WaltonPublisher: CQ Press
ISBN: 1452234388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 975
Book Description
How have African Americans voted over time? What types of candidates and issues have been effective in drawing people to vote? These are just two of the questions that The African American Electorate: A Statistical History attempts to answer by bringing together all of the extant, fugitive and recently discovered registration data on African-American voters from Colonial America to the present. This pioneering work also traces the history of the laws dealing with enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans and provides the election return data for African-American candidates in national and sub-national elections over this same time span. Combining insightful narrative, tabular data, and original maps, The African American Electorate offers students and researchers the opportunity, for the first time, to explore the relationship between voters and political candidates, identify critical variables, and situate African Americans’ voting behavior and political phenomena in the context of America’s political history.
Freedom to the Free: Century of Emancipation, 1863-1963
Author: United States Commission on Civil RightsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
Been in the Storm So Long
Author: Leon F. LitwackPublisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0394743989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 673
Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Based on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution." Contents 1. "The Faithful Slave" 2. Black Liberators 3. Kingdom Comin' 4. Slaves No More 5. How Free is Free? 6. The Feel of Freedom: Moving About 7. Back to Work: The Old Compulsions 8. Back to Work: The New Dependency 9. The Gospel and the Primer 10. Becoming a People
"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less"
Author: Hugh DavisPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801463645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
Historians have focused almost entirely on the attempt by southern African Americans to attain equal rights during Reconstruction. However, the northern states also witnessed a significant period of struggle during these years. Northern blacks vigorously protested laws establishing inequality in education, public accommodations, and political life and challenged the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals. In "We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less", Hugh Davis concentrates on the two issues that African Americans in the North considered most essential: black male suffrage rights and equal access to the public schools. Davis connects the local and the national; he joins the specifics of campaigns in places such as Cincinnati, Detroit, and San Francisco with the work of the National Equal Rights League and its successor, the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons. The narrative moves forward from their launching of the equal rights movement in 1864 to the "end" of Reconstruction in the North two decades later. The struggle to gain male suffrage rights was the centerpiece of the movement's agenda in the 1860s, while the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, northern blacks devoted considerable attention to assessing their place within the Republican Party and determining how they could most effectively employ the franchise to protect the rights of all citizens.