An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle before the NAACP by Shawn Leigh Alexander (review)

On June 4, 1890, African American newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune entered New York City’s Trainer Hotel and ordered a beer. After being refused service, Fortune was arrested for intoxication, disorderly conduct, and disturbing the peace. While the charges were dropped a short time later, Fortune decided to file suit against the Trainer Hotel and thereby “set a precedent to challenge the growing civil rights violations throughout the nation” (39). Fortune’s suit is notable, then, on a number of fronts. First, it originated 60 years before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) most famous test case: Brown v. Board of Education. Second, it was filed in New York City rather than in the South. And third, it speaks to the activities of Fortune and other African American civil rights activists at the turn of the century.

It is this final argument that animates Shawn Leigh Alexander’s An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle before the NAACP, which “provides the first full-length study of the major local and national civil rights organizations of the era: the Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve, and the Niagara Movement” (xii). Alexander thus describes an important period in the development of civil rights rhetoric, arguing that “these organizations laid the institutional, ideological, and political groundwork for the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909” (xii). Admittedly, this attention to the prehistory of the civil rights era is hardly new; Alexander’s book stands alongside such other studies as Patricia Sullivan’s Days of Hope, Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie, Aldon Morris’s Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, and John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day as a chronicle of the longer history of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, Alexander describes some of the earliest events in this history, situating his narrative between the civil rights cases of 1883 and the founding of the NAACP in 1909.

Alexander is careful, however, to situate his argument outside the narratives of a “long civil rights movement.” While he emphasizes “continuity in struggle,” Alexander is quick to note that “the activities of the organizations discussed here did not continue uninterrupted into the twentieth century with both national and local support” (xiv). Rather, the importance of the Afro-American League and the Afro-American Council lay in their pioneering of the legal strategy that undergirded the NAACP’s civil rights campaigns of the 1950s, and in these organizations’ marriage of the protest campaigns of Fortune and Ida B. Wells-Barnett with the uplift politics associated with Booker T. Washington.

An Army of Lions examines these contributions via a detailed history of the Afro-American League and the Afro-American Council and an analysis of these organizations’ public statements. Alexander avails himself of newspaper articles, correspondence, proceedings, and other public documents to examine how these organizations developed the rhetorical strategies used by the NAACP and civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. While An Army of Lions lacks the bibliographical essay common to historical studies and does not engage in the level of textual analysis expected from rhetorical studies, it nonetheless provides an engaging account of some of America’s earliest civil rights campaigns.

Alexander starts his account with Fortune’s call for an Afro-American League, a permanent civil rights organization capable of responding to the failure of Reconstruction and the resulting increase in lynchings and racially motivated violence across the United States. Chapter 1 examines the historical backdrop to Fortune’s call, whereas chapter 2 examines the establishment of the Afro-American League and its 1890 and 1891 conventions. Chapter 3 examines the premature demise of the League and the organization of the National Afro-American Council in its wake. Chapters 4 and 5...