An Army of Lions

In his excellent study, Shawn Leigh Alexander recovers the history of civil rights organizations that emerged in the United States between the 1880s and 1909 and that “laid the institutional, ideological, and political groundwork for the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in 1909” (p. xii). These organizations included the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve, and the Niagara Movement. Alexander shows that the naacp model of organizing—a permanent national organization supported by local chapters that battled white supremacy through the legal system and lobbying efforts—was initially developed by these earlier, lesser-known organizations. In so doing, he 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. The opening chapters document Timothy Thomas Fortune's calls for a permanent national civil rights organization in the midst of declining black rights in the 1880s and the short-lived incarnation of Fortune's vision between 1890 and 1894 in the National Afro-American League. Chapters then explore the 1898 formation and subsequent activities of the second national civil rights organization, the National Afro-American Council, which Alexander characterizes as an extension of its predecessor “in everything but name” (p. 83). Alexander meticulously documents the council's “multipronged process of propaganda campaigns, legal suits, and lobbying efforts,” as well as its struggles to include both radical and conservative leaders (p. 260). Between 1904 and 1905, increasing frustration with the council's limited legal victories and continuing ideological disagreements led to the formation of three additional groups that paralleled the league's and the council's multipronged protest model: the Committee of Twelve, the Constitution League, and the Niagara Movement. The study concludes by showing that although these groups never merged, the individuals who had participated in them for years and who had often forwarded parallel strategies peopled the early naacp and brought the momentum of their past organizing experiences with them to the naacp

Civil rights · Constitution · Ideology · Incarnation · League · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Theology · White (mutation · White supremacy · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

• African American Citizenship, the 1883 Civil Rights Cases and the Creation of the Jim Crow South

  Open Access•STEPHEN ROBINSON, Stephen R Robinson•History•2017

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