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

by Kate Masur

Black Philadelphians and their white allies urged Congress to take action to end slavery and protect the rights of free African Americans. At the end of December 1799, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and sixty-nine other Black Philadelphians signed a petition to Congress in which they described themselves as a “class of citizens” of the United States and part of “the People of the United States” who were members of the constitutional compact. They claimed rights as citizens and as human beings, arguing that since neither the Constitution nor the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act mentioned “Black people or slaves,” therefore “as we are men, we may be admitted to partake of the Liberties and unalienable Rights therein held forth.”