This author’s examination emphasizes her understanding of the importance of agency and self-creation as critical to the ambitions of the African American middle-class. She examines how middle-class leaders, such as editors, teachers, and ministers, strived to advocate for a racial consciousness even as they promoted the same virtues promoted by white leaders: education, temperance, morality, and economy. For African Americans, this also included a full commitment to antislavery activism. She emphasizes that black leaders taught that racial pride and activism had to be a major part of the struggle for true freedom. Ball draws upon a wide variety of primary sources: black magazines, slave narratives, personal memoirs, letters, humorous stories,
