The American Prejudice Against Color

The American Prejudice Against Color is at once personal testimony, abolitionist argument, and social diagnosis. William G. Allen recounts the violent public reaction to his engagement to Mary King, a white student, transforming a private love story into an indictment of racial caste in the antebellum United States. Written in lucid, restrained prose, the narrative gains force from its documentary plainness, standing beside slave narratives and reform pamphlets as a crucial text of nineteenth-century Black protest literature. Allen was a highly educated African American intellectual, born free, who became a professor at New-York Central College, one of the few interracial institutions of its time. His own life placed him at the center of the contradictions he exposes: admired for learning yet threatened for crossing the color line. Exile in Britain sharpened his perspective, allowing him to address both American hypocrisy and transatlantic abolitionist audiences. This book is recommended to readers interested in race, law, sentiment, and reform in American literature. Brief but morally expansive, it reveals how prejudice governs intimacy as well as politics, and remains indispensable for understanding the lived realities behind abolitionist rhetoric.