The move gave Black New Yorkers a place to start when they wanted to assert rights to “locomotion”—to travel and even settle in other states. In subsequent years, people waging the fight for racial equality in civil rights regularly invoked Massachusetts and New York as states that regarded African Americans as citizens. These states’ policies, read together with the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause, troubled and contradicted those who insisted that states could exclude free African Americans at will.
