Provocative work by distinguished African-American scholar traces the migration north and westward of southern blacks, from the colonial era through the early 20th century. Documented with information from contemporary newspapers, personal letters, and academic journals, this discerning study vividly recounts decades of harassment and humiliation, hope and achievement.

This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. While Black-led activism in this era is often overshadowed by the attention paid to the abolition movement, this collection centers Black activist networks, influence, and institution building. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism. Contributors: Erica L. Ball, Kabria Baumgartner, Daina Ramey Berry, Joan L. Bryant, Jim Casey, Benjamin Fagan, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Eric Gardner, Andre E. Johnson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Sarah Lynn Patterson, Carla L. Peterson, Jean Pfaelzer, Selena R. Sanderfer, Derrick R. Spires, Jermaine Thibodeaux, Psyche Williams-Forson, and Jewon Woo. Explore accompanying exhibits and historical records at The Colored Conventions Project website: https://coloredconventions.org/

Dexter J. Gabriel's Jubilee's Experiment is a thorough examination of how the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolition and African American citizenship in the US from the 1830s through the 1860s. It analyzes this public discourse, created by black and white abolitionists, and African Americans more generally in antebellum America, as both propaganda and rhetoric. Simultaneously, Gabriel interweaves the lived experiences of former slaves in the West Indies – their daily acts of resistance and struggles for greater freedoms – to further augment but complicate this debate. An important and timely intervention, Jubilee's Experiment argues that the measured success of former slaves in the West Indies became a crucial focal point in the struggle against slavery in antebellum North America.

Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness. Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it. Reformers' challenges call into question the notion that race is a self-evident site of identity among Black people. Their ideas instead spotlight legal, political, religious, social, and scientific practices that configured human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness. They show how a diverse set of actions constituted multi-faceted American phenomena dubbed "race."

This book offers new perspectives on race and transnationalism in nineteenth-century American literary studies, and ranges widely in developing new approaches to canonical and non canonical authors. It will appeal to graduates and scholars working on nineteenth-century American literature, transnationalism, and African American literary studies.