Nation Within a Nation

Publishers Weekly

For most of the 19th century, African-American people—their culture, potential, and possibilities—were largely defined by non African-Americans. Despite efforts, at times dangerous and even illegal, to define themselves as a community, cultural cues were being written by whites and the African-American community had no way of distinguishing itself or dispelling persistent stereotypes. Writing in a straight-forward style, Ernest (Chaotic Justice), Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Western Virginia University, parses a great deal of historical material about African-American organizing around the Civil War, when the community sought to define itself with fraternal organizations, churches, mutual aid societies, educational groups, and newspapers. Ernest presents a meticulous history that shows the depth of community organization efforts, both in the North and the South, long before emancipation, which will likely surprise readers whose ideas about community organizing were formed during the last election, when Barack Obama made the phrase part of the American vernacular. Ernest is exhaustive in his detail, for better and worse: he often gets bogged down in minutia and withholds his thesis until the end, which will frustrate the casual reader but reward his core audience. (Mar.)

Booklist

African Americans before the Civil War developed communities and within them an incredible array of organizations and associations aimed at racial and social uplift. Ernest comprehensively surveys these community formations, many founded by freedmen motivated by a need for self-preservation and self-determination in a nation that denied them freedom and full citizenship. Communities of interest developed around the issues of abolition, education, and religion as well as a need to address the negative images of blacks promulgated by white society. African Americans created churches, mutual benefit societies, fraternal organizations, national and local conventions, schools, literary and educational societies, and the black press to institutionally support their ambitions for full citizenship. Some of the community-organizing efforts were interracial, with whites, well-intending and not, often lending some support. The communities and their organizations fed off each other, with church affiliations leading to fraternal affiliations and promotion of education. The aims and traditions established by some of these pre–Civil War communities and organizations endure to this day, notably within the powerful AME and AME Zion churches.

CHOICE

Ernest (American literature, West Virginia Univ.) considers communities created by African Americans who were not enslaved and who could claim at least a nominal portion of freedom available in the US in the 18th century. These African Americans worked hard to create 'positive' communities in the face of the racist laws and restrictions of the oppressive US society in which they lived. These communities—cultural institutions, organizations, and so on—were marked by shared cultural practices, community affiliations, and a blending of heritage and experience—all of which derived from establishing a collective identity. The most common and important of these communities was (and remains) the African American church, but Ernest also documents various societies and mutual self-help organizations, including national freemasonry, Odd Fellows, fraternities and sororities, convention movements, women's movements, the African American press, and educational organizations. Including a postscript and notes on sources, this book does not offer anything that cannot be found in other resources; however, those interested in an overview of the genesis and growth of African American organizations will find this book helpful.

The Journal of American History

There are valuable insights to be gained from framing African American identity as a contingent rather than fixed...and A Nation within a Nation delivers on much of that promise....The book wonderfully communicates the richness of black institutional life and the often-breathtaking scope of its ambitions.

William L. Andrews

Thorough, lucid, and learned, A Nation Within a Nation reveals the processes by which nineteenth-century African Americans fashioned religious, social, cultural, and educational institutions to create community. This consistently informative book further buttresses Ernest's well-deserved prominence among leading intellectual and cultural historians of nineteenth-century black America.

Robert S. Levine

John Ernest's elegant A Nation within a Nation offers the best short introduction to African American community formation during the pre-Civil War period. Ranging through religious, educational, political, literary, and social reform organizations, Ernest shows how African Americans conceptualized and practiced—indeed 'performed'—black group identity in response to whites' antiblack racism. An essential study that illuminates the historical origins of the community-building work of Barack Obama and other twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American leaders.

Library Journal

Ernest focuses on the decades from the late 18th century up to the Civil War in the North. He examines the powers of African American organizations and networks, showing the context beyond slavery through which blacks found self-definition.