Historian Kate Masur has won the Littleton-Griswold Prize in US Law and Society from the American Historical Association for her 2021 book Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton & Co.). I liked this book a lot. Masur shows how the 19th Century civil rights movement used lawyers, organizers, politicians, and orators to fight and win local and state battles in the North that created the possibility, even the expectation, that Emancipation in the South would bring more than just the end of slavery. Here is my review.
Here is the conclusion of my review:
Masur uses some intriguing stories to introduce fairly complex legal and theoretical concepts developed on behalf of freedom during the half-century before Lincoln’s presidency, but she has enough confidence in her powers as an explainer not to dumb-down the history. Action is mixed in with the ideas, but the ideas are not lost in the narrative.
This is an excellent and accessible work on an important, but neglected, aspect of the freedom struggle that, through the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, moved forward not only the Black path to Equality, but opened up paths to freedom for so many others as well.
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