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

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur published by W.W. Norton (2021)

One of my favorite books of the last five years was The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha. A comprehensive history of the Abolitionists, The Slave’s Cause plowed familiar ground, but superseded earlier works through its broad view of a movement that stretched back into the 18th Century and its remarkable breath of coverage. Kate Masur’s brand-new Until Justice Be Done is similarly magisterial but it tells a story largely unknown to most American readers. While many of us are familiar with the story of the abolition of slavery, the story of Black civil rights often seems to only begin after Emancipation in 1863 and the 13th Amendment in 1865. The changes to the laws and Constitution through the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment appear to be out-of-the-blue innovations that sprang from the heads of Frederick Douglass, Thad Stevens, and lesser-known reformers.

Kate Masur shows that a coherent civil rights movement grew in the Northern states after those states, one after another, ended slavery following the Revolution. While most “Free States” tried to limit Black civic participation and control the movement of African Americans soon after their early 19th Century abolitions of slavery, Blacks and their allies organized and agitated for equal rights in the North and for the recognition of Blacks living in states like New York and Massachusetts as equal citizens of those states. And sometimes they won.

This impulse was present from the earliest days of Northern Emancipation. Masur writes:

The revolutionary era’s abolitionist movement sought not only the end of race-based slavery but also the recognition of the fundamental rights of the newly freed. At the behest of abolitionist activists, states passed laws designed to protect free African Americans from kidnappers who looked for vulnerable people to steal into slavery farther south. (p. 9)

Masur shows how this 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. When Black civil rights were recognized in Massachusetts, for example, the state began to advocate for its Black citizens who were arrested and imprisoned in places like Charleston while serving as merchant seamen. Legal arguments were developed as to why a Black man who was free in new Bedford did not lose his freedom when he travelled to South Carolina.

This is also the civil rights movement that pushed back against whites who hoped that freed slaves could be persuaded to leave the U.S. or be deported to “colonies” in Africa where whites would never be troubled by them again. The activists were able to come to a common set of goals for life after Emancipation, and it would not include mass deportations because there was an organized bi-racial movement to oppose the “Colonizationists.”

The author demonstrates that as the number of free Blacks in the North increased from the time of the Revolution until the outbreak of the Civil War, African Americans used their growth as a potential electoral block to provide a motive for politicians to adopt a civil rights agenda, and later, in the Republican Party, a civil rights party.

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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