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This chapter details events following Marshall's arrival in Africa in 1960. As an African American activist traveling to a rigidly controlled colony with the objective of aiding the nationalists, he was fortunate to get a visa. Once in Kenya, he would face colonial government restrictions on his activities. Nonetheless, going to Kenya gave Marshall a chance to step outside of it all, to make new connections. Although it might seem strange for an American lawyer with no previous experience with African law to serve as an expert at Kenya's constitutional deliberations, Marshall had something that an “underdeveloped” region like Kenya was thought to need: expertise in a “developed” legal system.

This chapter discusses the story of black power in Louisville which illuminates how that philosophy and movement flowed seamlessly out of earlier organizing as part of a longer search for new visions and strategies that would contribute to the ongoing project of overcoming racism. It notes that the WECC's black power program, the subsequent expressions of black power in Louisville, and the events that followed the persecution of militant activists took place in a context shaped by changes in the national freedom struggle and the response to them. It provides that although it had deep roots, and elements of black nationalism had emerged at various times throughout the modern era, by the mid-1960s the black power philosophy had become more popular and widespread, especially among the younger generation of African American activists.

This chapter examines the backgrounds and early adult experiences of five key leaders of the national organizations the book considers. These leaders are T. Thomas Fortune, founder of the National Afro-American League; Reverdy C. Ransom, the earliest outspoken radical within the National Afro-American Council; Mary Church Terrell, founding leader of the National Association of Colored Women; Mary White Ovington, member of the NAACP's inner circle of founders; and William Lewis Bulkley, a founder and early board member of the National Urban League. The chapter explores the similarities and differences of these leaders' backgrounds as well as the early development of their activist ideas and commitments.

The disputes that took place within the National Afro-American Council exposed deep ideological fissures among the organization's central figures. These fault lines are examined by contrasting the perspectives of Booker T. Washington, whose public persona emphasized accommodating white prejudice while working on economic advancement, with those of Reverdy C. Ransom, a social gospel minister of the African Methodist Episcopal church who was the earliest outspoken leader opposing Washington within the Afro-American Council. The chapter argues that the underlying rift between the accommodationist and the radical factions of the Afro-American Council was at bottom based on different underlying economic, rather than civil rights, views.

This chapter asks how the legal history of the civil rights movement would change if the doctrine of the U.S. Supreme Court and the lawyering of Thurgood Marshall did not dominate analysis. What if the work of local lawyers and activists took center stage? Focusing on the complicated dynamics within local Southern communities, it finds an extraordinary diversity of views among local African American activists, including many who held more radical and hopeful views of the possibilities of constitutional change than did the leading NAACP lawyers, but also including those who preferred a “pragmatic” approach by emphasizing the economic and political empowerment of black communities rather than integration and colorblindness.

This chapter focuses on the work of African American activists in the Department of Labor (DOL) during the Progressive era, and on two men in particular: W. E. B. Du Bois and George E. Haynes. The labor problem was in many ways at the heart of the Progressive project, and the establishment of the DOL and its forerunner, the Bureau of Labor, represented an early victory. Like many of these early institutional victories, the DOL was not a huge success. Its power was at the margins, and it rarely used such power for anything more than conciliation and tepid reformism. In the area of race, the DOL did little to disturb a racially fragmented labor market dominated by white employers and by unions that discriminated against African Americans. But the department, following the Progressive spirit of believing in the power of knowledge, science, and expertise to expose societal problems and begin the process of solving them, participated in a quite wide-ranging examination of black labor in American life. Some of this was through issued reports. Du Bois wrote three of these reports for the Bureau of Labor in the years around 1900. In addition, the DOL created the Division of Negro Economics, headed by George Haynes.

The concluding chapter explains how race had served defenders of slavery by providing them with an excuse to hold men and women in bondage. For their inhumane treatment of Africans during the Age of Enlightenment to be justified, their humanity needed to be ideologically stripped away—scientific racism served that purpose. Racist theories also kept other groups in subaltern positions. Mexicans with mestizo, mulatto, and Indian genealogies experienced racialization in the United States. Simply put, Americans, proud of their liberal political heritage and their democratic institutions, needed to see oppressed groups as somehow sub-human in order to reconcile their political beliefs with the nation’s less than egalitarian realities. It is for this reason that the politics of redemption practiced by Mexican immigrant and Mexican American activists merits attention.