Defining the Struggle

"Susan Carle writes a clear and convincing history of the first generation of civil rights organizers and advocates-the movement that started the Movement. We all stand on their shoulders. Let us remember their names and know their stories."--Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO, NAACP "Susan Carle's study of nineteenth-century social and legal activism is ground breaking. By shedding new light on the historical roots of the Second Reconstruction and mapping the intellectual links between modern civil rights groups and long-forgotten visionaries, Carle has made a remarkable contribution."--Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of the Bancroft-Prize winning Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement "Susan Carle vividly recounts the long and difficult struggle for African American voting rights in the United States. Carle's inspiring stories of heroic figures who persevered in the face of seemingly impossible odds are not only amazing; they are also timely. In light of the Supreme Court's recent decisions, this is a must read for activists who seek to engage in new forms of organizing, and for scholars who seek to produce new venues for creative thinking about what it means to be a full citizen of the United States."--Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor, Harvard Law School "This remarkable book lifts the veil that has obscured from view an entire early generation of civil rights lawyers. We learn here of organizations like the Afro-American League, the Afro-American Council, the National Association of Colored Women, the Niagara Movement, and the newly-formed NAACP and Urban League. Working in often desperate circumstances against formidable opposition, these tiny groups pioneered the civil rights movements' strategies of litigating test cases, mobilizing for legislative gains, and building social-service institutions. Their goals were not just legal equality, but economic justice and social welfare. It is astonishing to discover, thanks to Susan Carle's very moving as well as illuminating account, how much they were able to accomplish."--Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School "Graduate students and scholars will find Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle informative, as it pushes the boundaries of the early legal history of racial justice advocacy and modern civil rights activism back into the late nineteenth century. Readers and researchers will appreciate the extensive endnotes and bibliography of primary sources and secondary literature." -Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State University, North Carolina Historical Review "Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 provides a useful entry point into an examination of the legal history of civil rights and its relationship to the historiography of the long civil rights movement." -Christopher W. Schmidt. Law and Social Inquiry