By Victor Trammell

Photo credits: W.W. Norton & Company

Hawa Allan, a legal scholar, presents her insightful examination of “the continuous and sometimes violent struggle to properly integrate African Americans into the citizenship of the United States” within the context of the 1807 Insurrection Act’s history.

Noting that there is “no record of any congressional debate on Congress’s intent in producing and passing the law,” Allan recollects instances when the law has been instantiated, or nearly called into question, by U.S. presidents to dispatch federal forces to quell public strife, such as Franklin Pierce’s 1856 response to bloody clashes among pro-and anti-slavery enforcers in Kansas, as well as John F. Kennedy’s 1963 mobilization of the National Guard to impose Alabama’s court-ordered racial integration of public schools.

Allan establishes that the “insurrections” the government tried to put down had their origins in the fight for racial justice in each instance. Allan interweaves the viewpoints of W.E.B. Du Bois, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and more leading philosophers on problems of racial justice with her personal experiences, including discovering from her parents that a few of their white contemporaries on Long Island colluded to evict Black families.

She interweaves the viewpoints of W.E.B. Du Bois, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and more leading philosophers on problems of racial justice with her personal experiences, including discovering from her parents that a few of their white contemporaries on Long Island colluded to evict Black families. Allan’s remarkable synthesis of historiography, memoir, and psychology gives fresh insight into the holistic African American existence.

Buy Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship here.