ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate that the political and cultural "persuasion" of Northern African American male activists is illuminated by their concept of manhood. It explores the works of scholars which offer insights into how white males understood manhood and to use that work to synthesize several "styles" of manhood dominant in pre-war American society. African Americans formed their ideas of manhood at the disjuncture between American ideals of freedom and equality and American realities of slavery and prejudice. African Americans of the North formed their understanding of manhood in a white dominated society. David Leverenz considered questions of manhood in a recent study of writers associated with the American Renaissance. In its most elemental form, manhood was the demand that others recognize one's humanity. Slavery was a denial of manhood, a fact which all who escaped from its coils agreed upon. Ownership of one's own body meant more than just denying another's control over one's labor and sexuality.
