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Focuses on the issues in the antislavery movement in the United States raised by the case of slave, Margaret Garner who murdered one of her children in 1856. Examination of the critical ways in which Garner was spoken for by abolitionists; Analysis of the persistence of ventriloquism in the abolitionist movement; Questions raised on how best to engage that culture today.

A spirit of dissent animated the American Pre-Raphaelites, a movement comprising abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. In contrast to their more prominent colleagues, the artists now known as the Hudson River School, the American Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as eloquent critics of slavery and antebellum American society. The group united their political and aesthetic commitments by engaging selected pictorial strategies of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and embracing a radical empiricism. In landscapes, nature studies, and still lifes of modest dimensions, the American Pre-Raphaelites refused compositional conventions that endorsed rank, class, power, and possession by elevating the humble while eschewing the monumental. Through an examination of Thomas Charles Farrer's View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (1865, Smith College Museum of Art), this article argues that the American Pre-Raphaelites advanced what they viewed as an ethical style of landscape painting—one that assertively announced their abolitionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Black Lives Matter movement has called for the abolition of capital punishment in response to what it calls "the war against Black people" and "Black communities." This article defends the two central contentions in the movement's abolitionist stance: first, that US capital punishment practices represent a wrong to black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular black capital defendants or particular black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation of revolution to integration, involving a twofold effort to overthrow an unjust order and then to reconstitute society on terms of equality and concord between the antecedent order's ruling and subordinated classes, has long provoked controversy in Afro-American political thought. An exceptionally insightful analysis of this problematic relation appears in the political thought of the eminent nineteenth-century abolitionist and integrationist Frederick Douglass. In this article I explicate Douglass's analysis. I first develop his arguments for the needfulness and nobility of the revolutionary spirit for Afro-Americans along with its proneness to dangerous excess. Next I consider his complex effort to sustain and to govern that spirit, or to render it supportive rather than destructive of the ultimate end of integration. In a concluding section, I consider how Douglass's analysis may assist efforts to understand and to resolve ongoing race-related controversies in the post-civil rights era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comparative analysis of African American and Australian Aboriginal political protests from 1830 to 1865. It argues that British ethnologist James Cowles Pritchard's evolutionary ethnology was critical to understanding the various reform movements and organizations against the trans-Atlantic slave trade and in favor of Aboriginal Australian rights. Commentary is given regarding the points at which African Americans and Australian Aborigines both encountered issues of settler colonialism. A background of Pritchard and evolutionary ethnology is also included, as well as those of defenders of aboriginal equality.