| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism. By Dexter B. Gordon. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. xviii, 256 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8093-2485-7.)

Nineteenth-century black nationalism, narrowly defined, may be limited to the west African statism of Alexander Crummell and Edward Wilmot Blyden. Broadly defined, it may include the expressions of historical mission and racial messianism found in the writings of Maria Stewart and David Walker, who opposed the drive toward an African nation-state. Dexter B. Gordon's definition is both broad and presentist, as is manifest in his repeated allusions to Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March of October 16, 1995. Present-day public intellectuals such as Michael Dyson, Shelby Steele, and Cornel West are repeatedly referenced, to the neglect of Crummell, Blyden, and Henry McNeal Turner. Blyden was Liberian commissioner to the United States during the Civil War; he returned for a speaking tour in 1890 and was enthusiastically received by Turner, an influential journalist and Methodist bishop famous not only in the United States but in Liberia and South Africa. Marcus Garvey studied Blyden's copious writings, which are absent from Gordon's bibliography, and W. E. B. Du Bois invited him to serve on the editorial board of his proposed "Encyclopedia of the Negro" in 1909.

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