William A. Sinclair

William Albert Sinclair, born a slave in 1858, grew up in South Carolina during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Influenced by his childhood experiences, Sinclair spent his life fighting for the rights of African Americans and was an active member of the Afro-American mostra altro Council, the Constitution League, and their successor, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He spent many years speaking out against the rise of white supremacy and the developing Jim Crow system. Inspired by the scholarship and activism of T. Thomas Fortune and W. E. B. Du Bois, Sinclair published The Aftermath of Slavery: A Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro, one of the most complete analyses of slavery and the years immediately following emancipation. Shawn Leigh Alexander is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he also serves as the interim director of the Langston Hughes Center. He is the author of An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights before the NAACP and the editor of a collection of T. Thomas Fortune's writings, T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator. mostra meno