Masur, Kate

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

W. W. Norton (New York)

2021

OUR SYNOPSIS: Kate Masur illuminates how from the American Revolution through to Reconstruction, “Across the free states, activists forcefully insisted that laws that made explicit race-based distinctions had no place in American life.” She argues, “This sustained struggle against racist laws was America’s first civil rights movement.” (xii) These activists built the groundwork that the Republican Party used to enact federal policies towards equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction. While there was a wide array of contributors, “African Americans were at the forefront of the activism and conceived racial equality most expansively.” (xiii) She shows how free Black Americans migrated from the South to free states following the Revolution, creating places of civil rights struggle. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance banned slavery in many of these states, but it also led to legislative backlash against Black freedom and rights. Black and antislavery activists contended with the vast influence of state-level power in this era but were not deterred by setbacks. Debates over Black citizenship took place at the federal level as well, for example in the lead-up to the Missouri Compromise.

BIG QUESTIONS:

How did this first civil rights movement differ, or not, from its twentieth-century counterpart?
To what extent did gradual emancipation unfold across state lines?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“They had inherited a country in which equality was enshrined in the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, but almost nowhere else; a country in which few believed the abolition of slavery would lead inexorably to multiracial democracy; and a country where many believed that repealing racist laws would lead directly to race was. Many white people thought the problem was so intractable that the best course for free African Americans was to leave the country altogether. In the course of eight decades, from the nation’s founding to the 1860s, a growing number of people had the courage to challenge those ideas and put forth a different vision.” (343)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

James Forten, “Letters from a Man of Colour [sic], on a bill before the Senate of Pennsylvania,” 1813, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC06046, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/GLC/documents/2023-07/06046_OS.pdf.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS: