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.