In January 1890, journalist T. Thomas Fortune stood before a delegation
of African American activists in Chicago and declared, We know our
rights and have the courage to defend them, as together they formed the
Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights
organization. Over the next two decades, Fortune and his fellow
activists organized, agitated, and, in the process, created the
foundation for the modern civil rights movement.
An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP traces
the history of this first generation of activists and the organizations
they formed to give the most comprehensive account of black America's
struggle for civil rights from the end of Reconstruction to the
formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People in 1909. Here a host of leaders neglected by posterity--Bishop
Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Jesse Lawson, Lewis G. Jordan,
Kelly Miller, George H. White, Frederick McGhee, Archibald
Grimké--worked alongside the more familiar figures of Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, who are
viewed through a fresh lens.
As Jim Crow curtailed modes of political protest and legal redress,
members of the Afro-American League and the organizations that formed in
its wake--including the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the
Constitution League, and the Committee of Twelve--used propaganda, moral
suasion, boycotts, lobbying, electoral office, and the courts, as well
as the call for self-defense, to end disfranchisement, segregation, and
racial violence. In the process, the League and the organizations it
spawned provided the ideological and strategic blueprint of the NAACP
and the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century,
demonstrating that there was significant and effective agitation during
the age of accommodation.
