Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley College reviewed Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction in The Nation this week. Here are a few excerpts from the review:
Just as the long history of racism in the North tends to be forgotten, so too does the long history of those who sought to dismantle its racist and anti-Black laws. While it is common to cite the civil rights movement or perhaps the Reconstruction period as the first attempt at securing an egalitarian United States, these struggles began much earlier. Historian Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction helps exhume the often neglected history of both Northern racism and slavery and those Black freedom struggles in the 19th century that sought to abolish them. A clear and compelling account, Masur’s book pushes us to rethink our understanding of anti-Blackness in the North and the activism that helped free Black people through the constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and granted them citizenship and equal protection under the law. Despite legal setbacks, unfavorable court decisions, and white supremacy, Black and white activists and advocates in the 19th century managed to make their belief in fairness and inclusion concerning Black civil rights the mainstream view.
Many have written about the 13th and 14th amendments, but the origins of their underlying principles can be found, Masur argues, in the 18th century and in an often ignored history of Black activism that goes back as far as the early days of the American republic. Her earlier book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C., focused on this history in the context of the District of Columbia—both in terms of its local government and as the seat of the national government. In Until Justice Be Done, Masur widens her geographic scope and considers how the struggle for equality manifested itself all over the country, particularly in the Midwestern states. By doing so, she reminds us that Black activism and the fight for civil rights were found not only in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. She also reminds us that until the North recognized the need to dismantle its own racist and exclusionary practices, it held no moral high ground over the Southern slaveocracy….
One aspect of Masur’s book that is particularly welcome is her decision to center her narrative on the efforts of Black Americans to achieve a national consensus surrounding citizenship and civil rights. As much as we love Frederick Douglass, there were many other, unsung Black activists operating outside of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia who were as determined to speak out and act up and as vital to the struggle for emancipation. Writing about the mostly unknown Black activists in Ohio and Illinois, Masur describes how they worked tirelessly to repeal racist laws and create enclaves of Black achievement. She reveals how they not only changed laws but won over white allies, who took up these causes as their own. The repeal of the Black laws in Ohio, for example, was a victory that many hoped would be repeated in other Midwestern states, such as Illinois and Indiana….
Though her book is deeply researched, Masur misses some opportunities to highlight the role and contributions of Black women in this struggle. She mentions Mary Jones, the wife of John Jones, a community leader in Alton, Ill., whose home was a safe haven for fugitives. Mary helped raise money to purchase runaways, but not much else is revealed about her. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a leading abolitionist and activist for civil and women’s rights, isn’t mentioned until the epilogue. Had Masur chosen to look west, she could also have included Mary Ellen Pleasant, an abolitionist and activist whose work earned her the moniker “the mother of human rights in California.” Several of Pleasant’s high-profile cases ended in major victories for civil rights, including her suit against railroad companies in San Francisco, Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission Railroad Company, which went all the way to the California Supreme Court. After almost two years of litigation, San Francisco outlawed segregation on the city’s public transportation. Yet despite the contributions of such women, Masur’s book is largely a story of men: The neglect of Black or other women is an unfortunate but all too typical feature of the field. Scholars often blame the lack of sources, but how sources are read also plays a major role in the way women—and Black women in particular—are silenced.
Nevertheless, Until Justice Be Done reminds us that, despite the popular conception of American history, change and progress are not inevitable in the United States. We are not marching confidently toward a more egalitarian and democratic society. Without constant activism and radical pressure from the bottom up, even the advances that have been won are not secure.
Today, Black people face many of the same legal barriers they did in the 19th century: segregated schools, limited relief for the poor, unfair trials, and voter suppression. Although the Black laws have been repealed, anti-Black sentiments have remained—in the North as well as the South. In fact, most of the recent police killings and shootings of Black people that have captured national attention have taken place in the North and particularly the Midwest: Tamir Rice in Ohio, George Floyd in Minnesota, Laquan McDonald in Illinois, Jacob Blake in Wisconsin. Recently, a study found that the top 15 cities ranked as the worst for African Americans were nearly all in the North and primarily in the Midwest (Fresno, Calif., was the sole exception). In my own state of Massachusetts, a state labeled as progressive, Black people are only 7 percent of the population and yet make up 27 percent of the prison population. The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team revealed several years ago that the average net worth of white families in Boston is over $247,000, whereas for Black people that figure is just $8.
Such appalling statistics have a deep history, but so does Black activism. I think it’s fair to view the social and political mass organizing in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois as ongoing and necessary because Black laws were repealed but anti-Black sentiment has persisted. The fight for fair treatment within the criminal justice system, as well as access to certain neighborhoods and even health care, are rooted in the long, hard fights that Black activists and their white allies took on over 200 years ago.
Until Justice Be Done does not offer a recipe for obtaining equal recognition and treatment for Black people, but it does illustrate how they and their allies envisioned a path toward building a better world. By examining how free Black people living in the North had to navigate hostile terrains and discriminatory laws while simultaneously pushing for the end of slavery, it also reminds us that emancipation and equality are not the same thing. This book is not about abolitionism; much like being antislavery, being in favor of abolition wasn’t enough. Freedom requires civil rights, political rights, and economic rights. As the Black abolitionist Joshua Easton declared in 1837, “Abolitionists may attack slaveholding, but there is a danger still that the spirit of slavery will survive, in the form of prejudice, after the system is overturned. Our warfare ought not to be against slavery alone, but against the spirit which makes color a mark of degradation.”
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