AMERICAN NEGRO PROTEST MOVEMENT: FROM BLACK NATIONALISM TO BLACK POWER.

The article focuses on the development of the Afro-American protest movement, how its objectives and tactics have changed over the past 150 years, and to offer a sociological explanation for these changes and for the movement per se. Evoked by the paradox of a free society's dependence upon a system of slave labor, the earliest black nationalist programs in the United States date back more than a century. As early as 1788, The Negro Union of Newport, Rhode Island, advocated the repatriation of Afro-Africans in their African homeland, but the majority of free Afro-Africans felt that migration to Africa would constitute a betrayal of their brothers in bondage. Closer to the Civil War, however, as hope for the Afro-Americans in the U.S. diminished with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and the Dred Scott Decision, sentiment for recolonization grew stronger, and some Afro-American intellectuals who had previously opposed the idea now favored it. With the approach of World War II and national preoccupation with the defense posture of the United States, liberals in both the North and South, as well as the federal government, once again ignored the plight of Afro-American citizens.