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 Grimke-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."

In honor of the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois's birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Library has prepared a new edition of Du Bois's classic, The Souls of Black Folk. Originally published in 1903, Souls introduced a number of now-canonical terms into the American conversation about race, among them double-consciousness, and it sounded the ominous warning that ""the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."" In a new introduction, Shawn Leigh Alexander outlines the historical context of this critical work and provides rare documents from the special collections archive at the Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Unlike Du Bois's more scholarly work, Souls blends narrative and autobiographical essays, and it continues to reach a wide domestic and international readership. This moving homage to black life and culture and its sharp economic and historical critique are more important than ever, resonating with today's unequivocal demand that Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.

William Albert Sinclair, born a slave in 1858, grew up in South Carolina during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Influenced by his childhood experiences, Sinclair spent his life fighting for the rights of African Americans and was an active member of the Constitution League, and their successor, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Inspired by the scholarship and activism of T. Thomas Fortune and W. E. B. Du Bois, Sinclair published The Aftermath of Slavery: A Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro, one of the most complete analyses of slavery and the years immediately following emancipation.
First published in 1905, The Aftermath of Slavery provided a historical analysis of the late nineteenth century that underscored the existence of black resistance to white domination during slavery and Reconstruction. This Southern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Shawn Leigh Alexander, which emphasizes the importance of this book as a tool to understanding the meanings of peace and citizenship, as well as violence and terror, in the years directly following emancipation.

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most prolific African-American authors, scholars, and leaders of the twentieth century. In this book, Alexander's traces the development of Du Bois' thought over time. Paying significantly more attention to the many pivotal and previously unexamined intellectual moments in his life, this biography illustrates the experiences that helped bend and mold the indispensable thinker that W. E. B. Du Bois became: the kind whose crowning achievement is his continued relevance in contemporary culture, from classrooms to curbsides.

"Alexander's important documentary edition restores T. Thomas Fortune's central place in African American thought and activism during the age of Jim Crow. His well-executed edition is essential for all college, university, and public library collections."--John David Smith, University of North Carolina, Charlotte "Fortune is one of the most significant figures in American history, not just African American history. Alexander has created a reader that permits all of us to hear from one of the most remarkable and contemporary-sounding voices black America has produced."--James P. Danky, University of Wisconsin Born into slavery, T. Thomas Fortune was known as the dean of African American journalism by the time of his death in the early twentieth century. The editorship of three prominent black newspapers--the New York Globe, New York Freeman, and New York Age--provided Fortune with a platform to speak against racism and injustice. For nearly five decades his was one of the most powerful voices in the press. Contemporaries such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington considered him an equal, if not a superior, in social and political thought. Today's histories often pass over his writings, in part because they are so voluminous and have rarely been reprinted. Shawn Leigh Alexander's anthology will go a long way toward rectifying that situation, demonstrating the breadth of Fortune's contribution to black political thought at a key period in American history. Shawn Leigh Alexander is an assistant professor in the department of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas.