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

by Kate Masur

Still, Shadd lamented the conditions produced by the Illinois black laws. In cities like New York and Cincinnati, she said, Blacks and whites were “more nearly equal by the law,” and that status made possible the “proper antagonism … which is of vital importance to final success in any undertaking.” Shadd understood that racial equality in law did not necessarily mean racial equality in practice. But she also knew that African Americans were in a far better position to fight back in places that acknowledged their basic civil rights than in those that did not.2 Her allies in the first civil rights movement would have agreed. The many and diverse people who lent their voices to the movement converged not around the most profound of anti-racist arguments, but rather around the straightforward demand that the nation accept the principle of racial equality, first in civil rights and then in political rights. They had inherited a country in which equality was enshrined in the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, but almost nowhere else; a country in which few believed the abolition of slavery would lead inexorably to multiracial democracy; and a country where many believed that repealing racist laws would lead directly to race war. Many white people thought the problem was so intractable that the best course for free African Americans was to leave the country altogether. In the course of eight decades, from the nation’s founding to the 1860s, a growing number of peo...