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

by Kate Masur

The Cincinnati Enquirer insisted that the black laws were not designed to degrade or oppress African Americans, but simply to prevent Black “settlement within our borders.” Governments had always adopted measures “for the protection of peace of the actual settlers of a State.” To that end, the paper said, Ohio could “discourage the ingress of any class or complexion of persons.” The newspaper’s assessment of which traits marked people as part of a separate “class or complexion” was not surprising. European immigrants were pouring into Ohio by the mid-1840s, but the Enquirer saw them quite differently from new arrivals of African descent. The state should welcome people who could “safely and freely assimilate, after the accidental barriers of language and habits are removed,” the paper intoned. By contrast, “Providential law” had created separate “races” that must not, and could not, commingle as equals.33 Nature had ordained that people of European descent could become Ohioans, the paper concluded, while people of African descent must remain as outsiders.