Reflecting on the response of black leaders to the expansion of white supremacy following the Civil War, W. E. B. Du Bois commented, “A time of doubt and hesitation, of storm and stress, overtook the freedmen's sons; and then it was that Booker Washington's leadership began.”Footnote ¹ Seeking to explain the failure of Reconstruction and to attack the Washingtonian politics of accommodation, Du Bois characterized black leadership in the late nineteenth century as ineffectual, disorganized and weak. It is this, still dominant, historical narrative that Shawn Leigh Alexander sets out to challenge in An Army of Lions. Asserting that Du Bois's Niagara movement or the subsequent founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did not develop in a vacuum, Alexander traces the roots of national civil rights activism back to organizations such as the Afro-American League, the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve and the Afro-American Council. Making good use of an extensive list of primary newspaper sources, the book outlines the “methods of agitation, legal redress, and moral suasion” of these organizations, convincingly concluding that “there was active agitation in the age of accommodation” (297).

Alexander emphasizes the role of the Afro-American League in challenging the expansion of Jim Crow throughout this period. Founded in 1890 by the newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune and Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church, the League operated under the banner of “Organization, cooperation, and agitation” (35) and engaged in legal work designed to protect black citizenship rights at local, state and federal levels. The organization was fairly successful on this front, taking up a number of cases where it was deemed that the 14th and 15th Amendments had been contravened. In a particularly intriguing case, the organization filed a successful suit against the Trainer Hotel in New York City, which had refused service to Fortune in their bar. This use of a local incident to create a legal challenge to segregation on the national level allows Alexander to draw a direct line “from the bar to Brown” (40) and to argue that the league's handling of the case established a legal framework that would later be adopted by the NAACP. This point is significant in that it encourages us to look beyond the NAACP when considering the legal approach to civil rights activism. Whilst the league, and its successor, the Afro-American Council, had their shortcomings, this argument repositions landmark cases such as Brown v. Board and Browder v. Gayle within the broader framework of the “long civil rights movement” – as tried, tested and evolving protest strategies that had their roots in the late nineteenth century.

An Army of Lions is perhaps at its strongest when recounting and analysing the writings of prominent black leaders such as Fortune, John E. Bruce, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells. The militant language of these black elites is particularly striking and complicates the notion that black leadership in this era was largely accommodationist. This combative approach was nicely summed up by Fortune, who in an 1884 New York Globe article proclaimed, “Let us agitate! agitate! AGITATE! Until the protest shall wake the nation from its indifference” (7). However, this militant, all-inclusive language of black protest often belied the reality of the political situation on the ground. As Alexander demonstrates, there were major problems with the strategy of these early national organizations – most notably their inability to raise finances and attract mass support – that hindered their ability to defend the civil rights of African Americans. Another particularly strong feature of An Army of Lions is its emphasis on the work of black women leaders. The anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B. Wells are outlined in detail, whilst the national civil rights activism of figures such as Josephine Turpin Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell and Fannie B. Williams are clearly outlined. However, whilst Alexander acknowledges the efforts that were made to exclude black women from key organizational positions, there is little analysis of the gendered politics of respectable black leadership that shaped black activism throughout this period. Finally, An Army of Lions makes a key revisionist point by dispelling certain ideas relating to the conservative politics of Booker T. Washington. By highlighting his covert work with more militant civil rights organizations, the book complicates our view of the “Tuskegee Wizard” as a reactionary figure, asking us to think in more detail about the realities of black leadership in the American South.

Overall, An Army of Lions provides a well-crafted and necessary reminder of the complexity of black protest in the United States. In illuminating the activities of the Afro-American League and its successors the book draws a parallel between the problems national civil rights leaders faced in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. By highlighting the successes and failures of these forerunners to the NAACP, Alexander ultimately asks us to further rethink our chronological understanding of the civil rights movement, whilst demonstrating the diversity of the inherent organizational problems that black leaders faced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.