Recently published, by Kate Masur (Northwestern, History): Until Justice Be Done — America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Norton 2021). Here is the book description from the publisher:
A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War.
The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.
Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.
Via Reuel Schiller's essay at Jotwell: The Civil Rights Movement You Haven't Heard Of, which begins:
I have no doubt that most Jotwell readers—particularly readers of its legal history section—remember sitting in their U.S. History class, learning the accepted narrative of “The Coming of the Civil War.” The Missouri Compromise. Check. The Mexican War. Check. The Wilmot Proviso. Check. The Compromise of 1850. Check. The Kansas-Nebraska Act. Check. The Dred Scott case. Double check for the audience of this review, I’d bet. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, Harpers Ferry, Lincoln’s election, Fort Sumter. Check, check, check, and check. Many of us enjoyed this story of the political and legal maneuvering that shaped the conflict between freedom and slavery. What our eighteen-year-old selves probably didn’t notice was that the story focused primarily on the federal government. We also probably assumed that freedom and slavery were the only two statuses available to Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Kate Masur’s marvelous Until Justice Be Done shows us otherwise. Indeed, she recounts a very different series of events—stories of the fight for the rights of free Black Americans at the state and local level for the hundred years between the Revolutionary War and the end of Reconstruction. This “first civil rights movement” runs alongside the traditional story of sectionalism and slavery, intersecting with it and explaining it in ways that a myopic focus on the federal government and political conflict over slavery do not. Indeed, after reading Until Justice Be Done, the standard narrative seems thinner and less substantial than it once was. Knowing what was left out, you can’t look at the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in the same way again.
Originalists should be particularly interested in the book's claim that "[w]hen Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision [that is, the vision of the pre-war African American activists and their white allies] of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment." If that's right, it seems that an aggressively pro-equality reading of the Amendment's original meaning — that is, anti-Plessy and pro-Brown, among other things — would gain additional grounding.
Posted at 6:32 AM