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

by Kate Masur

THE ASPIRATIONS OF antebellum civil rights activists notwithstanding, the federal measures adopted during Reconstruction did not secure a baseline guarantee of racial equality in civil rights. Operating on the principle of “separate but equal,” state and local governments continued to insist that race was a legitimate distinction in public policy and to reinforce forms of racial subordination that, as antebellum activists well understood, had originated in race-based slavery. Governments regularly used facially neutral laws—including those associated with vagrancy and other crimes linked to poverty—to perpetuate racial inequality. Meanwhile, white supremacist violence, as well as racial discrimination by private property owners, by employers, and in the administration of justice, went largely unchecked. From the 1890s to the 1950s, Congress chose not to use its powers under the Fourteenth Amendment to mitigate the damage.