Race over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston

In Race over Party, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood explores a fierce battle waged by a group of African Americans in Boston who recognized the peril of attaching their political fortunes to a Republican Party that had become apathetic to questions of civil rights. While it is clear that a partisan division within the Reconstruction-era Republican Party had become a full-fledged movement by 1886 with the rise of the Sumner National Independent League, the connection between the black independent movement of the 1880s and early twentieth-century civil rights organizations like the Colored National League and the Massachusetts Racial Protective Association is less apparent. Engaging important historiographies on post-Civil War African American life in the North, postbellum black political culture, and the trajectory of the Republican Party after Reconstruction, Race over Party tells the story of Boston's black independents with a keen eye for detail and a deep empathy for the difficult political choices these leaders made to build a better future for their community.