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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur Christopher James Bonner (bio) Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction. By Kate Masur. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. Pp. 456. Cloth, $32.00; paper, $20.00.) In the summer of 1826, Washington, D.C., authorities arrested a Black New Yorker named Gilbert Horton on the suspicion that he had escaped slavery. Black travelers were presumed enslaved in much of the South, and when Horton could not produce documents to verify his freedom, authorities sent him to jail with plans to sell him into bondage if he could not provide such documentation. Horton’s arrest drew the attention and ire of prominent New Yorkers, such as Governor DeWitt Clinton. Clinton and others insisted that the arrest violated Horton’s rights as a free person and as a citizen of New York State. In so doing, they made significant claims about Black rights and the federal system as a whole. Horton’s story thus reflects central themes in Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done. Black people lived under a raft of oppressive state and local laws, and an interracial cadre of activists challenged those laws in ways that helped reshape the legal order in the mid-nineteenth century. Masur illuminates how the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment came to exist as measures that legalized racial equality in civil rights. She traces the roots of these policies through interconnected stories of state and federal government, Black and white activism, and a shifting party landscape to reveal how a civil rights movement functioned in the early United States. This book offers a clear and careful narrative of persistent advocacy and political possibility. Masur covers a broad geography, reflecting connections in political and legal development across state lines. Much of this focuses on state restrictions of Black freedom. In 1804, Ohio legislators approved a measure requiring Black people to document their freedom upon entering the state, and in 1807 the state outlawed Black testimony in legal cases involving white people. Virginia had previously enacted similar controls, and Ohio lawmakers embraced restrictions, in part, because they feared an influx of African Americans seeking refuge within their borders. Masur shows that these laws had roots in both racism and anxiety about poverty. State officials invoked a broad power to police communities, restricting Black [End Page 267] life, criminalizing vagrancy, and limiting who could claim state residency and be entitled to poor relief. Ohio’s laws offered a blueprint for measures in Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania; lawmakers across the North could justify racist legislation while claiming that they sought only to secure the public good. Black and white activists struggled against these laws for decades. They developed a robust concept of civil rights, understood as distinct from political rights, the latter being viewed as privileges reserved to a select few. Advocates for civil equality demanded that Black people have rights to sue, to testify in court, to move freely, and to receive equal protection of the law. They protested such measures as Ohio’s residency restriction, as well as the Negro Seamen Acts, which empowered southern officials to jail Black sailors, purportedly to protect the South from dangerous outside influence. As Masur notes, activists called Black men citizens and said these laws violated the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause. But they also made a broader argument that jailing free Black sailors “violated fundamental rights to which all persons were entitled” (122). The breadth of that claim is central to the civil rights movement Masur explores. Many white Americans opposed Black political equality and doubted claims that African Americans were citizens, but by the 1840s growing numbers were open to the idea that Black people were entitled to civil rights. Some white abolitionists viewed equal civil rights as essential to the fight against slavery. Masur highlights a series of petition campaigns that challenged exclusionary laws in specific states, and also urged people across the country to think about the harmful results of racist legislation. Masur builds on recent studies of African American protest with...