"This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism"-- Provided by publisher.

How to Use This Book and Its Digital Companions: Approaches to and Afterlives of the Colored Conventions / Jim Casey, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Sarah Lynn Patterson -- Critical Conventions, Methods, and Interventions. Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship: The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement / P. Gabrielle Foreman ; A Word Fitly Spoken: Edmonia Highgate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the 1864 Syracuse Convention / Eric Gardner ; Where Did They Eat? Where Did They Stay? Interpreting Material Culture of Black Women's Domesticity in the Context of the Colored Conventions / Psyche Williams-Forson ; Reconstructing James McCune Smith's Alexandrine Library: The New York State/County and National Colored Conventions (1840-1855) / Carla L. Peterson -- Antebellum Debates: Citizenship Practices, Print Culture, and Women's Activism. Flights of Fancy: Black Print, Collaboration, and Performances in "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (Rejected by the National Convention, 1843)" / Derrick R. Spires ; Performing Politics, Creating Community: Antebellum Black Conventions as Political Rituals / Erica L. Ball ; Colored Conventions, Moral Reform, and the American Race Problem / Joan L. Bryant ; Deleted Name but Indelible Body: Black Women at the Colored Conventions in Antebellum Ohio / Jewon Woo -- Out of Abolition's Shadow: Print, Education, and the Underground Railroad. The Organ of the Whole: Colored Conventions, the Black Press, and the Question of National Authority / Benjamin Fagan ; As the True Guardians of Our Interests: The Ethos of Black Leadership and Demography at Antebellum Colored Conventions / Sarah Lynn Patterson ; Gender Politics and the Manual Labor College Initiative at National Colored Conventions in Antebellum America / Kabria Baumgartner ; Secrets Well Kept: Colored Conventioneers and Underground Railroad Activism / Cheryl Janifer LaRoche -- Locating Conventions: Black Activism's Wide Reach and Unexpected Places. Social Networks of the Colored Conventions, 1830-1864 / Jim Casey ; The Emigration Debate and the Southern Colored Conventions Movement / Selena R. Sanderfer ; Further Silence upon Our Part Would Be an Outrage: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Colored Conventions Movement / Andre E. Johnson ; A Convention of Grumblers! Creating Black Texans and Reproducing Heteropatriarchy / Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux ; None but Colored Testimony against Him: The California Colored Convention of 1855 and the Origins of the First Civil Rights Movement in California / Jean Pfaelzer.