ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework that goes beyond "factional disputes" and "personal jealousies" to explain the failures of the African American activists' leadership. It deals with more recent scholarship that it is a misperception to view antebellum African American thought as an assimilationist-nationalist dichotomy. Several secondary works address the question of the free African American community in the ante-bellum North. Historians have differed on the significance of the efforts of African American activists in the pre-Civil War years. Discussing the leadership of African American activists, the Peases write that black leaders complained about a shortage of followers. Howard Bell credits more African Americans with being ready to emigrate from the US than do most other students of the period. He points out that the first national convention supported emigration and asserts that it was only the influence of white abolitionists that diverted African American attention to reforms which would supposedly elevate them.
