"In her thoughtful and impressive book, Joan Bryant mines the archives to uncover a rich array of African American historical figures who forged a black intellectual tradition of race thinking throughout the long nineteenth century. Bryant's chapters deftly trace the push and pull among these thinkers between ideologies of race consciousness and racial unity that served as a springboard to their activism. Countering white supremacist arguments, these black men (and a few women) debated varied-and often conflictual-ideas, among them racial distinctiveness and human brotherhood; African emigration and American citizenship; worldwide Negro nationality and the formation of a US based composite race." -- Carla L. Peterson, Author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City

"In Reluctant Race Men, Joan Bryant enters into the full complexity of US racial history- and, in doing so, she gets at the messy and often paradoxical work of advocating for African American rights and communities without further implicating Black Americans in the infernal logic used to control them. This is a fascinating and exemplary study of the challenging work of social and political advocacy in a nation engulfed by its elaborate and unstable fictions about race." -- John Ernest, University of Delaware

"The strength of this book is the meticulous and rigorous way in which Bryant lays out her argument about the "race challenge" through a detailed analysis of the political conventions also referred to as "colored conventions," held by African Americans in the nineteenth century. Bryant uses the minutes and notes taken from these conventions to provide insight to the deliberations held by Black leaders and intellectuals of that time." -- Derek G. Handley, Society for US Intellectual History