Book Review

Between the Union victory in 1865 and, roughly, the screening of Birth of a Nation in 1915, white Americans reforged a unified nationalism at the expense of true democracy. The most vivid of the antidemocratic fault lines, as W. E. B. Du Bois and others noted at the time, was the color line, as reflected in black disenfranchisement, in lynching and other modes of white supremacist terror across the former Confederacy and parts of the North, in Chinese exclusion, and in the frank turn-of-the-century policy of imperialism. In Rituals of Race Alessandra Lorini excavates a radical, democratic countertradition during this period, embracing the efforts and ideas of figures such as Du Bois, Franz Boas, Mary Ovington, Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, and unsung members of such groups as the Citizens' Protective League. This is a welcome contribution: too often Americans have characterized black leadership—whether Booker T. Washington and Du Bois or Martin Luther King Jr. and Fanny Lou Hamer—as having made important strides for "their people" when what has really been at stake is American democracy itself. If historiography has anything to contribute to the nation's vaunted ideals, then a clear-sighted portrait of who those ideals' most vigorous defenders have been is surely a good place to start.

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