Until justice be done America's first civil rights movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

The struggle against racist oppression in the antebellum North is excavated in this illuminating history. Northwestern University history professor Masur (An Example for All the Land) explains that even in so-called "free" states, Blacks were forbidden to vote or testify in court cases involving white people; were required to collect guarantees of good behavior from white sponsors in order to move to a new state; were for years banned from settling in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Oregon; and endured the threat of kidnapping by slave-hunters or arrest and enslavement if they ventured into Southern states. Masur also explores the growth of a multiracial civil rights movement that braved mob violence to challenge these measures through protests, action in state legislatures and Congress, and increasingly powerful antislavery political parties. She tells this complex story in lucid prose that brings out the drama of charged racial politics while insightfully analyzing the era's tortured constitutional theorizing about states' rights and Black citizenship. This engrossing study goes beyond sectionalist accounts of the South's peculiar institution to show how racism and civil rights activism have shaped every corner of America. Photos. (Mar.)

In this telling book, historian Masur (An Example for All the Land) shows that the movement for civil rights has a long history that provided the vocabulary, directions, dimensions, and legal and constitutional imperatives that shaped civil rights thereafter. She closely tracks the arguments and ways that Black and white activists persistently challenged racist laws that denied free Blacks basic civil rights, such as free movement, on the grounds that state and local governments had the right to protect themselves from persons likely to pose dangers to public health and safety. Activists organized petition campaigns, lobbied governments, and published literature to make the case for rights. Throughout her clearly written and compelling book, Masur makes the essential point that definitions and protections of civil rights was largely a struggle carried on in the states, before the Civil War and Reconstruction invested the federal government with such an interest. VERDICT At a time when definitions of citizenship and civil rights are again under assault, Masur's careful accounting of the ways Americans came to understand such terms provides an informed perspective to appreciate that such concepts never were, and thus never are, self-evident. They require due diligence and vigilance to secure and sustain at all levels of government. An essential book.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

A well-respected scholar of racial issues in 19th-century America offers a history of "the first civil rights revolution." Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern, chronicles the efforts by Black and White Americans, from the Revolution through the 1870s, to end slavery and racial discrimination. Following An Example for All the Land (2010), which looked at Reconstruction in Washington, D.C., the author expands her study to the entire U.S. She introduces a broad coalition of people, with women and African Americans as much in the forefront as White males, who, working to capture political force, eventually gained their victory through the young Republican Party. Though Masur focuses on the Old Northwest, she does not exclude major nodes of activism such as Missouri and Massachusetts. Her major interpretive innovation is to locate the roots of the legal fetters on Black Americans not just in slavery, but also in enduring Colonial laws regarding poverty, vagrancy, and local taxes. The prejudice hidden under the cover of local ordinance proved to be as difficult to overcome as White Americans' heedlessness toward their Black neighbors. Facing such realities, reformers used petitions, court suits, and political action to gain their objectives through a bloody civil conflict and passage of the 14th Amendment. Masur fittingly closes with a sobering lesson for today--i.e., that the gains of constitutionalized manumission and equal rights were reversed by the Supreme Court starting in 1873 and ending in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It required a second civil rights movement decades later to reignite Americans to further work. The author could have provided more on the role of religion in awakening Americans to racial injustices as well as on the general context of social reform in antebellum America. Nonetheless, her book joins Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause (2016) in providing authoritative historical coverage of its subject. A fine history of the first phase of the nation's most enduring moral reform effort. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.