Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-Century America
Joan L. Bryant
Oxford University Press
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 19th century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism.