Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

IN THE WAKE of Cincinnati’s antiblack riot of 1829, the state legislature adopted new measures designed to further marginalize African Americans who lived within its jurisdiction. In the spring of 1831, Ohio legislators passed a new poor law that banned African Americans from ever gaining a legal settlement in the state—that is, it made them ineligible for poor relief should they become needy, and, in a more abstract sense, declared that they were perpetual outsiders to the state’s community. The legislature also passed a comprehensive law that established public education in the state but provided that public schools were “for the instruction of the white youth of every class and grade, without distinction.” The school law exempted African Americans from paying property taxes to support the public schools, but it, together with the new settlement law, sent a clear message that African Americans were not welcome in Ohio.7