Radical Prohibition: African Americans Writing Race and the Anti-Drink Movement (1860-1919)

FAIN: FT-53186-05

DoVeanna Sherie Fulton
University of Memphis (Memphis, TN 38152-0001)

"Radical Prohibition" is a literary history project that examines temperance work and writing by African American activists. This work locates temperance activism alongside social reform movements of abolition, civil rights and women’s suffrage to illuminate the full spectrum of protest literature and activity that concerned African Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These social reformers confronted racial ideology of Black inferiority while arguing the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption. Placing the anti-drink agenda in consonant with the discourses of anti-slavery, racial and gender equality, African American activists created a radical rhetoric of temperance that negotiated the politics of race with struggles for moral reform.