Forward Steps

Abstract

Reform in all its various coats became somewhat more respectable, but most of all, African Americans were learning how to work the system and were taking the lead in fighting for equal rights. Black Rhode Islanders gained voting rights. Boston's African American community with significant white support kept George Latimer from being reenslaved and in the process prompted the creation of personal liberty laws in every New England state but Maine. By the mid-1840s all of New England north of Rhode Island and Connecticut, with the single exception of Boston, had integrated schools. Black communities with white allies and increasingly sympathetic towns and cities prevailed. That would not have happened in a white supremacist society. New England certainly had its white supremacists, but their number was small. White supremacists were racists, but racists were not necessarily white supremacists.