Kate Masur, "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction" (Norton, 2021)

New Books in African American Studies · Feb 10, 2023 · 49m

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…