Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History
Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize
Winner of the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize • Winner of the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History • Winner of the American Society for Legal History's John Phillip Reid Book Award
One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021
A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War.
The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.
Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The struggle against racist oppression in the antebellum North is excavated in this illuminating history. Northwestern University history professor Masur (An Example for All the Land) explains that even in so-called "free" states, Blacks were forbidden to vote or testify in court cases involving white people; were required to collect guarantees of good behavior from white sponsors in order to move to a new state; were for years banned from settling in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Oregon; and endured the threat of kidnapping by slave-hunters or arrest and enslavement if they ventured into Southern states. Masur also explores the growth of a multiracial civil rights movement that braved mob violence to challenge these measures through protests, action in state legislatures and Congress, and increasingly powerful antislavery political parties. She tells this complex story in lucid prose that brings out the drama of charged racial politics while insightfully analyzing the era's tortured constitutional theorizing about states' rights and Black citizenship. This engrossing study goes beyond sectionalist accounts of the South's peculiar institution to show how racism and civil rights activism have shaped every corner of America. Photos.
