Shawn Leigh Alexander. An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle before the NAACP.

Abstract

In this book, Shawn Leigh Alexander focuses on African American approaches to civil rights organizing from the late 1880s to the start of the twentieth century. The book's primary emphasis is national organizing by black elites, such as the Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, and the Committee of Twelve, which may be “unappreciated or understudied” but which “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). The main theme of the book is that the NAACP did not materialize from nowhere and that its principle tenets had already been espoused by groups existing from the 1880s onward. While histories on the civil rights movement (1955–1968) have been critiqued for being too focused on Martin Luther King, Jr., Alexander claims that W. E. B. Du Bois has become, mistakenly, central to our understanding of the period immediately before the organization of the NAACP, especially his role in the Niagara Movement, which has obscured important organizations that existed and influenced modern activism. Alexander's major accomplishment is to place Booker T. Washington, seen as a conservative black leader, into a more progressive debate as he was often involved, albeit covertly, with more militant civil rights organizations but was “locked into maintaining a public stance of accommodation due to his dependence on conservative northern philanthropists and moderate southern whites” (p. xvi). Indeed Washington is the dominant character of the book, as new black groups had to define themselves against his prevalent philosophy and organizational machine during the nadir of race relations in the post-civil war period with the codification of Jim Crow and the rise of pseudo-scientific racism.