Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood. Race over Party

After the Civil War, black Bostonians hoped that the Republican Party would reward African American support with a commitment to racial equality. Even before the end of Reconstruction, some black leaders in “the Hub” (a nickname for Boston originating in an 1858 Atlantic Monthly article) explored political alliances outside the Republican Party, hoping that a more independent stance would induce white politicians to compete for black support. By the end of the century, the efficacy of electoral politics to produce justice looked increasingly dubious, sparking a turn to a movement model centered on “racial solidarity” rooted in moral claims not partisan identity (173). Thus, the chronological arc of Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood’s thought-provoking Race over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston neatly corresponds to the arc of its argument: locally and nationally partisan, electoral politics failed to produce respect, let alone the liberation, that African Americans coveted. Indeed, the author regards as “tragic” that black Bostonians invested so much energy across so much time for so little gain (4).

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