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An Army of Lions Shawn Leigh Alexander

An Army of Lions By Shawn Leigh Alexander

An Army of Lions by Shawn Leigh Alexander

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Summary

In 1890, a delegation of African American activists formed the Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights organization. Over the course of nearly two decades, these activists fought to end disfranchisement and segregation, and to contest racial violence, creating the foundation for the NAACP and the modern civil rights movement.

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An Army of Lions Summary

An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP by Shawn Leigh Alexander

In January 1890, journalist T. Thomas Fortune stood before a delegation of African American activists in Chicago and declared, We know our rights and have the courage to defend them, as together they formed the Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights organization. Over the next two decades, Fortune and his fellow activists organized, agitated, and, in the process, created the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.

An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP traces the history of this first generation of activists and the organizations they formed to give the most comprehensive account of black America's struggle for civil rights from the end of Reconstruction to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Here a host of leaders neglected by posterity-Bishop Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Jesse Lawson, Lewis G. Jordan, Kelly Miller, George H. White, Frederick McGhee, Archibald Grimke-worked alongside the more familiar figures of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, who are viewed through a fresh lens.

As Jim Crow curtailed modes of political protest and legal redress, members of the Afro-American League and the organizations that formed in its wake-including the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the Constitution League, and the Committee of Twelve-used propaganda, moral suasion, boycotts, lobbying, electoral office, and the courts, as well as the call for self-defense, to end disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence. In the process, the League and the organizations it spawned provided the ideological and strategic blueprint of the NAACP and the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century, demonstrating that there was significant and effective agitation during the age of accommodation.

An Army of Lions Reviews

An Army of Lions is a stunning and heroic work of research about one of the great 'origins' stories of American history. With remarkable originality, Alexander illuminates the grassroots civil rights organizations, leadership, and strategies in the nineteenth century, well before we typically think about those efforts. In the hands of this very talented historian, we see that T. Thomas Fortune and others struggled with the same questions that occupied the later generations of Du Bois and King. This is a scholarly achievement of the first order, with wide social and political implications today.-David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era


With impressive detail, An Army of Lions documents a complex era in African American politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alexander offers readers invaluable insights into how African American activists responded to the rising violence, disfranchisement, and segregation that characterized the Jim Crow era. Most importantly, he helps us to see how a broad range of early civil rights organizations were vying with one another for national leadership, political access, and mass support.-Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan


In his excellent study, Shawn Leigh Alexander recovers the history of the civil rights organizations that emerged in the United States between the 1880s and 1909 . . . and in doing so sheds new light on the origins of the NAACP and its strategies for battling racism and on the nature of black politics during the Nadir.-Journal of American History


Alexander's extremely rich monograph unravels the complex ideological, personal, and institutional features of grassroots African American civil rights organization, leadership, and protest during what historian Rayford W. Logan termed the 'nadir' of race relations in the US, the era of Jim Crow. . . . Alexander's great accomplishment is in his digging more deeply into the primary sources-especially newspapers-and in establishing a wider context for early black activist and protest groups that culminated in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.-Choice


An Army of Lions should catapult its author, Shawn Leigh Alexander, to the forefront of young scholars of African American history. This brilliant narrative successfully demonstrates that black activists formed national civil rights organizations predating DuBois's Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.-The North Carolina Historical Review


Alexander's major accomplishment is to place Booker T. Washington, seen as a conservative black leader, into a more progressive debate as he was often involved, albeit covertly, with more militant civil rights organizations.-American Historical Review


In detailing the organizational history that lay behind the founding of the NAACP, An Army of Lions provides a compelling narrative that will appeal to historians, sociologists, and scholars of rhetoric alike. Alexander's account emphasizes both the continuity in rhetorical strategies between the Afro-American Council and the NAACP, and the institutional context from which these continuities emerged. But perhaps most importantly, Alexander turns our attention to early and often-overlooked episodes in civil rights history, episodes that contributed in important ways to our understanding of civil rights in the present.-Rhetoric & Public Affairs

About Shawn Leigh Alexander

Shawn Leigh Alexander is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas.

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1. Aceldama and the Black Response
Chapter 2. Stand Their Ground on This Civil Rights Business
Chapter 3. Interregnum and Resurrection
Chapter 4. Not Just A Bubble in Soap Water
Chapter 5. To Awaken the Conscience of America
Chapter 6. Invasion of the Tuskegee Machine
Chapter 7. An Army of Mice or an Army of Lions?
Chapter 8. It Is Strike Now or Never

Epilogue
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Ac knowledgments

Additional information

CIN081222244XG
9780812222449
081222244X
An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP by Shawn Leigh Alexander
Shawn Leigh Alexander
Politics and Culture in Modern America
Used - Good
Paperback
University of Pennsylvania Press
20130314
408
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - An Army of Lions