African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861.

Lipton, Michael D.

African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861. By Leslie M. Alexander, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xxiv + 258 pp. $45.00 hardcover.

Any consideration of black political activism in nineteenth century New York will inevitably lead to a healthy admiration for the remarkable tenacity and continuity demonstrated by antebellum advocates of freedom and racial equality. In an era typified by factionalism and the meteoric rise and equally swift demise of political parties, black demands for unqualified citizenship and an end to southern slavery remained surprisingly consistent. Despite repeated demonstrations of white hostility to the emergence of black political power, and the crippling burden of unyielding racism, black activists maintained a clear and relentless call for change. In African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, Leslie M. Alexander searches for an explanation to this extraordinary persistence in the turbulent racial environment of early national and antebellum Gotham. In doing so, she positions herself among the leaders and activists who championed the black community, and demonstrates how an ongoing debate over identity helped define campaigns for equal justice while simultaneously impeding them.

Central to Alexander's analysis is a conception of Black Nationalism that does not crumble when confronted by the apparently contradictory desire for full social, economic, and political inclusion. Building upon a foundation laid by Wilson Moses and Sterling Stuckey, Alexander describes black leaders who "understood themselves to be a distinctive race that shared a common heritage, history of oppression, and political destiny" (xvi). Alexander owes much to Craig Steven Wilder's notion of a Black Nationalism committed to self-determination across the Diaspora, and thus less imperiled by the contradictions required by political pragmatism. Upon this theoretical framework, the author constructs a narrative in which racial identity and political activism are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Alexander adheres largely to a chronological scheme as she traces the development of black political identity from the early national era to the eve of the Civil War. She is particularly adept at describing the internal ideological disputes within black leadership as the merits of moral uplift are compared to the value of maintaining distinct connections to a shared African heritage. For Alexander, this debate is not held in a vacuum, but is influenced by events outside the black community, as in the defensive reaction to the questionable motives of the colonization movement, dealing a fatal blow to the aspirations of advocates for repatriation and emigration. Throughout, the author describes a resilient and determined leadership possessed of often radically divergent strategic aims yet remarkably unified as to their overarching goals. While times of greatest stress produced fractures, as with Henry Highland Garnet's revival of the emigration movement in response to the repeated setbacks of the 1850s, Alexander demonstrates that New York City's black leadership maintained their commitment to the goal of improving the condition of all black Americans.

In the final chapter of African or American?, Alexander strays from her chronologic framework to provide a narrative of the ill-fated Seneca Village, though this digression does not detract from the monograph's stated goals. The sad story of this short-lived attempt at constructing a distinctive black community on the margins of a hostile white city illustrates clearly how strategies to promote racial identity could complement those designed to achieve full American citizenship. Alexander recognizes that Seneca Village represented a desire for autonomy that also reflected a "commitment to ... the attainment of political power" (154) as the very property purchased by Seneca Village's inhabitants could be improved in order to meet the high standards of New York's racially-specific voting laws. It is an elegant illustration of Alexander's concept of antebellum Black Nationalism.

Any attempt to create a narrative that adheres to the perspective of a community so often imperfectly represented in the historical record can be excused a few shortcomings, and it is easy to put aside minor quibbles when considering the entirety of African or American? Events outside New York's black community sometimes seem distant and removed, but this is often compensated for by the degree of granular detail Alexander provides of intimately connected, often highly combative black leaders, as is a sometimes frustrating lack of comparison to other cities in the state and region. Yet such complaints do not diminish the value of an important contribution to the literature, and an insightful analysis from within a community too often viewed from without.

Michael D. Lipton

Binghamton University