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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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface(p. xi)
• Chapter 1 "On the Grounds of Expediency and Good Policy" Free-State Antiblack Laws in the Early Republic(p. 1)
• Chapter 2 "A Free Man of Colour, and a Citizen of This State" The Privileges and immunities of Citizenship in the 1820s(p. 42)
• Chapter 3 "The Sacred Doctrine of Equal Rights" Ohio Abolitionists in the 1830s(p. 83)
• Chapter 4 "The Rights of the Citizens Of Massachusetts" African American Sailors in Southern Ports in the 1830s(p. 119)
• Chapter 5 "Self-Preservation is the First Law of Nature" State-to-State Conflict and the Limits of Congress in the 1840s(p. 152)
• Chapter 6 "That All Men are Created Free and Equal" The Liberty Party and Repeal of the Ohio Black Laws in the 1840s(p. 185)
• Chapter 7 "Injustice and Oppression Incarnate" Illinois and a Nation Divided in the 1850s(p. 225)
• Chapter 8 "Establishing One Law for the White and Colored People Alike" Republicans in Power during the Civil War, 1861-1865(p. 267)
• Chapter 9 "To Restrain the Power of the States" The Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment(p. 303)
• Epilogue(p. 342)
• Acknowledgments(p. 359)
• Note on Historiography(p. 365)
• Notes(p. 373)
• Index(p. 435)

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

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

Publishers Weekly Review

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.)

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Kate Masur is professor of history at Northwestern University. A finalist for the Lincoln Prize, she is author and editor of acclaimed books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.