Discusses how activists in Boston upheld their anti-slavery tradition and promoted an equal rights agenda during the years between 1890 and 1920, a period in which African-Americans throughout the country were being deprived of civil and political justice.

Boston, the headquarters of radical abolition during the antebellum period, is, paradoxically, often thought of as unfriendly to African-Americans today. In this study of the city's significant role in the fight against racism between 1890 and 1920, Mark Robert Schneider illuminates the vital links between Boston's antislavery tradition, race reform at the turn of the century, and the modern civil rights movement. Originally published by Northeastern University Press in 1997. With a new foreword by Zebulon Vance Miletsky.

This book punctures the myth that important national civil rights organizing in the United States began with the NAACP, showing that earlier national organizations developed key ideas about law and racial justice activism that the NAACP later pursued.

Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.

Winner, 2022 NASSH Book Award (Monograph) On September 6, 1892, a diminutive Black prizefighter brutally dispatched an overmatched white hope in the New Orleans Carnival of Champions boxing tournament. That victory sparked celebrations across Black communities nationwide but fostered unease among sporting fans and officials, delaying public acceptance of mixed-race fighting for half a century. This turn echoed the nation’s disintegrating relations between whites and Blacks and foreshadowed America’s embrace of racial segregation. In this work of sporting and social history we have a biography of Canadian-born, Boston-raised boxer George Dixon (1870–1908), the first Black world champion of any sport and the first Black world boxing champion in any division. George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, 1870–1908 chronicles the life of the most consequential Black athlete of the nineteenth century and details for the first time his Carnival appearance, perhaps the most significant bout involving a Black fighter until Jack Johnson began his reign in 1908. Yet despite his triumphs, Dixon has been lost to history, overshadowed by Black athletes whose activism against white supremacy far exceeded his own. George Dixon reveals the story of a man trapped between the white world he served and the Black world that worshipped him. By ceding control to a manipulative white promoter, Dixon was steered through the white power structure of Gilded Age prizefighting, becoming world famous and one of North America’s richest Black men. Unable to hold on to his wealth, however, and battered by his vices, a depleted Dixon was abandoned by his white supporters just as the rising tide of Jim Crow limited both his prospects and the freedom of Blacks nationwide.

Born into an elite Boston family and a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, white Massachusetts aristocrat Wendell Phillips’s path seemed clear. Yet he rejected his family’s and society’s expectations and gave away most of his great wealth by the time of his death in 1884. Instead he embraced the most incendiary causes of his era and became a radical advocate for abolitionism and reform. Only William Lloyd Garrison rivaled Phillips’s importance to the antislavery and reform movements, and no one equaled his eloquence or intellectual depth. His presence on the lecture circuit brought him great celebrity both in America and in Europe and helped ensure that his reputation as an advocate for social justice extended for generations after his death. In Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past, the world’s leading Phillips scholars explore the themes and ideas that animated this activist and his colleagues. These essays shed new light on the reform movement after the Civil War, especially regarding Phillips’s sustained role in Native American rights and the labor movement, subjects largely neglected by contemporary historical literature. In this collection, Phillips’s views on matters related to race, ethnicity, gender, and class serve as a lens through which the contributors examine crucial social justice questions that remain powerful to this day. Tackling a range of subjects that emerged during Phillips’s career, from the effectiveness of agitation, the dilemmas of democratic politics, and antislavery constitutional theory, to religion, violence, interracial friendships, women’s rights, Native American rights, labor rights, and historical memory, these essays offer a portrait of a man whose deep sense of fairness and justice shaped the course of American history.

This collection of essays by the historian and activist Aviva Chomsky includes work on topics ranging from immigration, to labor history, to popular culture. Chomsky’s incisive prose brings the perspective of a historian to bear on current events in a way that adds depth and nuance to topics that are of the utmost importance at this moment in world history. Unwanted People fits into Chomsky’s larger project to debunk the mythical history of the United States as a nation of immigrants or a melting pot. Her work uncovers centuries of racially motivated immigration policies that inform the current rhetoric surrounding immigration and displaced peoples. Her essays build on that foundation and expand into new territory. Exploring history as a discipline that works from the ground up rather than from the top down, Chomsky challenges the dominant narratives and gives voice to disenfranchised and unwanted people. Touching on topics from revolutionary violence and race to colonialism and its aftermath, this collection of lucid thoughts reveals the hidden histories of the people who shape our modern political and economic landscape.