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

by Kate Masur

Most Americans of this era distinguished civil rights from political rights, which included the rights to vote, hold office, and serve on juries. The majority believed political rights were more like privileges, reserved for a subset of people charged with making decisions for the whole community. Some of the white Americans who joined the movement to secure civil rights for free African Americans wanted to go no further than that. They did not support racial equality in political rights, or they did so only reluctantly, when pushed by the force of the Civil War and the need to reconstruct the nation. That cohort was in a sense the movement’s lowest common denominator, a part of the coalition that was both critically important and, at times, frustratingly timid.