In Against Wind and Tide, Power-Greene traces the rhetoric and activism of black anti-colonization from the founding of the American Colonization Society (acs) in 1816 through the Civil War. Focusing on such free black public figures as Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, James T. Holly, and Henry Highland Garnet, Power-Greene analyzes antebellum black efforts to derail the acs’s plan to transport free blacks from the United States to the West African colony of Liberia. Scholars have long contended that most northern free blacks remained highly unreceptive to this scheme in the years before the Civil War. By closely interrogating this response, Power-Greene seeks not only to provide a nuanced and finely drawn account of antebellum free-black resistance to the acs but also to reframe our understanding of the very nature of antebellum black protest culture.
Power-Greene argues that the immediate black backlash to...