| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Patrick Rael. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. (The John Hope Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 421. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

Patrick Rael makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature on that portion of the U.S. population variously described between 1776 and 1863 as "Free Africans," "Colored People," "Anglo-Africans," or simply "the blacks." The so-called "naming controversy"—that recurrent obsession among African Americans over how to designate themselves as a racial or ethnic group—is among his central concerns. The issue has been the subject of several previous treatments, including those of Lerone Bennett, Jr., Sterling Stuckey, and this reviewer. Rael's contribution to the discussion is certainly appropriate, since the attempt by antebellum black people to define their self-image through the wielding of words reflects the universal human obsession with attempts at controlling reality through the manipulation of signs, symbols, and incantations. Rael performs a service by reprinting a series of visual images provided by the Library Company of Philadelphia, well-known, deleterious iconographs depicting the semiotic obstacles African Americans faced in attempting to create images of genteel respectability. Rayford W. Logan made similar observations in The Negro in American Life and Thought (1954), demonstrating that the problem persisted well into the twentieth century. . . .

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