The new book Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction
by historian Kate Masur got an extremely favorable review in today’s New York Times. From the review:
There are several themes that emerge in this excellent book. The first has to do with how African-Americans led the struggle Masur describes, even as racially discriminatory laws made them vulnerable — whether to the whims of local officials exerting their discretion or to white mobs seeking legal cover for anti-Black violence. Another concerns how the language of race and class was, as Masur puts it, “fungible”: Even after the Civil War, legislation cracking down on “vagrancy” and “vagabondage” allowed state legislatures in the former Confederacy to practice discrimination under cover of laws that seemed “race-neutral.”
So much in this history was contingent; so much could turn on a single word. Toward the end of her book, Masur describes the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1866, when senators haggled over who would be protected against racial discrimination, deciding to replace the inclusive word “inhabitants” with the more restrictive “citizens.” That way, states could still discriminate against Chinese immigrants and, as one West Virginia Republican put it, “other inferior races that are now settling on our Pacific Coast.” This citizenship provision intersected with a whites-only naturalization policy that would render Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization until 1943.
If this is a cleareyed book, it’s still a heartening one. Masur takes care to show not only the limitations of what was achieved at each step but also how even the smallest step could lead to another. The people she writes about seized openings and opportunities where they could find them, and then they used any hard-won advances to push for more. “Changing the law was not everything,” she writes, “but it was a start.”
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