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

Abstract

In May 1865, just as the American states were beginning to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, Frederick Douglass spoke on the precarity of Black civil rights in New York City. He asked his listeners to imagine “in what new skin” the “Old Snake” of racial oppression would come forth. He reminded them that before the Civil War, wherever Northern abolitionists had found the word white in state constitutional provisions and legislation, they immediately recognized a code word for slavery, and they “made war upon it” until the word had disappeared from their state constitutions and laws. But now, with the defeat of the Southern slave states, the time had come to finish that work. The destruction of slavery had not guaranteed Black rights—even the basic right to freedom—because the indignity of unequal treatment remained in place everywhere, not only in the former slave states of the Confederacy. Abolitionists, he argued, must now fight to eradicate racial discrimination and segregation throughout the nation. Douglass’s words appear near the end of Kate Masur’s important new book, but they encapsulate several of her core contributions to the field of civil rights history. First, she clarifies the earlynineteenth-century dispute over the contested and often contradictory meanings of freedom and rights, particularly in cases where free Black people possessed few legal tools to protect themselves from incarceration or even enslavement. Second, Masur teases apart the complicated subject of the fundamental rights of persons who claimed citizenship in one state but whose right to freedom was challenged in another state merely by virtue of their race. Finally, she explores how both proand anti-Black rights Americans developed constitutional tools in arguing for and against the civil rights of Black Americans. Douglass had contended that without the full and equal rights of citizenship, African Americans, and their white allies, would inevitably lose the fight for political equality. Moral and ethical arguments might have served as important weapons in the fight against slavery, but in order to establish fundamental constitutional rights of Black Americans,