When we were first asked to write this book, we decided against a narrative of black abolitionism in the antebellum North. Instead we determined to analyze the perceptions, attitudes, values, goals and means of those Northern Negroes who struggled within the abolitionist crusade--and frequently outside of it--to achieve a meaningful freedom for themselves and their brethren in slavery. Because they were black and therefore smarted under restrictions and discriminations which white Americans never experienced, they often found the antislavery crusade, as whites understood it, inadequate. So they worked, wrote, and lectured in separate race organizations and publications as well as in more general reform societies to express their views and achieve their ends.

Assessed by its goals or its organizational efficiency, black abolitionism was a failure. Yet to dwell upon its leaders' quarrels and their remoteness from their community, or to concentrate on irresolution, parochialism, indifference and apathy is largely to miss the meaning of free black activism in the antebellum North.