The Colored Conventions were an enduring part of Frederick Douglass’s life. He first attended a convention in 1843. Decades later, his voice defined the national Colored Convention of 1883 with a powerful speech on the value of Black activism, “Why Hold A Colored Convention?” Over the years, Douglass worked alongside tens of thousands of African Americans to build state, regional, and national coalitions. The challenges of forging a national coalition shaped many convention debates, reaching beyond slavery and freedom to focus on citizenship and Black civil, legal, educational, and voting rights. Before the Civil War, those debates helped push Douglass from a focus on the immorality of slavery to the political issues facing northern Black communities. During and after Reconstruction, he became the dean of Black activism, guiding attempts at national conventions in New York, Washington, DC, Louisiana, and Kentucky to mobilize the power of Black communities across the country.

Contemporary Black activists – including those active in the #BlackLivesMatter movement – continue to protest against white supremacy and slavery’s legacies. In the conclusion to this book, I trace how Black Americans who visited Britain as a result of the Ferguson Solidarity Tour in 2015 contributed to this transatlantic tradition of protest and forged their own networks across the country to challenge racism and police brutality. Their methods of organization, protest, and awareness-raising were adapted from their historical precedents and to the contemporary world.

During their transatlantic journeys to Britain throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans engaged in what I term “adaptive resistance,” a multifaceted interventionist strategy by which they challenged white supremacy and won support for abolition. Alongside my recovery of this mode of self-presentation in sources I have excavated from Victorian newspapers, I use an interdisciplinary methodology to (re)discover black performative strategies on the Victorian stage from the late 1830s to the mid-1890s. Performance was only one strand in the black activist arsenal, however. The successful employment of adaptive resistance relied on a triad of performance, abolitionist networks, and exploitation of print culture, and if an individual ensured an even balance between all three, it was likely their sojourn was successful.

In adopting this resistance strategy, black men and women forged a Black American protest tradition in Britain which was based on their literary, visual, and oratorical testimony. Black men and women sought to make their voices heard in a climate dominated by white supremacy; they refused to capitulate and educated thousands of people on slavery and its legacies through physically and mentally demanding tours organized across Britain.