Professor of English, Africana Studies, and History

(Humanities and Information Scholar, Spring 2027)

This book shares the history of the longest Black organizing movement for early Civil Rights through the stories of its founding families. Revealing the mentorship, influence, cooperation, and conflict within Black activist communities, this book examines how African Americans shaped the central democratic debates of their era in the movement for nineteenth-century Black rights and dignity. The book focuses on five founding families of the Black convention movement. The educator and emigrationist Mary Ann Shadd Cary, known as the first Black woman newspaper editor in North America as well as the very first to enroll in law school, grounds one chapter alongside her father, Abraham, a founder of the convention movement, and her brothers Isaac and Abraham. Brothers Charles and John Mercer Langston, the grandfather and great-uncle of poet Langston Hughes, also take center stage. Together, the two were leaders at more than 50 conventions, first in Ohio and then over the expanding U.S. John Mercer was the first law dean at Howard University, president of two universities, and the first Black U.S. Congressman from Virginia. The Watkins family highlights the contributions and activism of the intrepid activist and popular poet Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper), the most prolific Black novelist of the 19th century and co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women. Similarly, Jonathan and Mifflin Gibbs’s convention activism spanned from Philadelphia and California to New York, Vancouver, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Arkansas, and beyond. Before the Rev. Jonathan Gibbs became Florida’s first Black Superintendent of Schools (and with his son, helped found Florida A&M) and Mifflin became the nation’s first elected Black judge, they were taken under the wing of Frederick Douglass as young men. Douglass and his networks, influences, and tactical differences within Black communities are the focus of Founding Families’ last chapter. Though his anti-slavery activism has rightly been the subject of the scholarship on his life, writing, and legacy, we know too little about Douglass’s Black worlds. For forty years as a young man and a wizened organizer, Douglass attended Black conventions with friends, foes, and the next generation of his family. Douglass gave some of his most soaring speeches at conventions he led. The Black powerhouses of the nineteenth century were not only fascinating individual subjects; they were products of collective action and organizing. Founding Families tells the story of Black convention activism that is the prequel to the NAACP and current movements for inclusive democracy. It builds on the author’s co-edited collection and the award-winning repository and exhibits at ColoredConventions.org for which Foreman is the founding faculty director.