This dissertation, presented in two parts, analyzes press reports and other accounts of annual meetings and activities of the National Afro-American Council (1898-1908) to chart its contributions to the civil rights movement and assess its constructive legacy. Part One, published in 2008 as Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council (Southern Illinois University Press), provides a narrative account of the Council's existence. Part Two, the contextual essay described by this abstract, draws upon additional sources to make explicit the author's analysis of the Council as the most crucial bridge between the post-Reconstruction and Wilsonian eras.

This contextual essay expands upon the argument in Broken Brotherhood that the Council cannot be assessed in terms of any one leader, but must be viewed through interlocking relationships of major leaders—Alexander Walters, Thomas Fortune, Booker Washington, and George White—and subordinates. By further analyzing the competing factional visions for the future, the contextual essay redefines the Council's history in broader terms, including dissolution and rebirth.

In the 1890s, a new generation of African Americans strategized to combat racial discrimination, injustice, and violence amid ideological and political pressure. Among all-black organizations created in this period, the National Afro-American Council best mirrors political and organizational divisions facing its members and the race at large, while alternately embodying traditional Republican partisanship, accommodationist policies of Booker Washington's conservative faction, and radical intellectualism of W. E. B. Du Bois and others. Ultimately a victim of organizational weaknesses, internal factions, and insufficient revenue, the Council set the definitive example for later success of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and National Urban League. The essay demonstrates that more than any other period organization—particularly the Niagara movement—the Council deserves recognition as the first nationwide example of racial cooperation for self-protection, and the eventual model for successful bi-racial American organizations dedicated to civil rights and racial justice. Drawing from a range of period newspapers and letters, the contextual essay analyzes the full contributions of Council leaders and their followers, as well as important secondary roles of women members, during the Council's existence.