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

by Kate Masur

On Tuesday, August 31, 1841, a fight between Irish and Black workers touched off days of sporadic violence, and on Friday of that week, white residents carried out an organized onslaught against the Black community. One white observer estimated that some two thousand white residents took to the streets as the mob set upon an African American neighborhood. Black residents fired guns in self-defense and the crowd retreated, but then it returned with increased fury. White rioters planted a cannon in a major thoroughfare and fired it three times “among the negroes,” causing chaos and terror. To quell the uprising, a Saturday meeting of white “citizens” and city officials resolved to disarm the Black population and enforce the 1807 black law as well as the 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act. The meeting, led by the mayor, empowered the militia and the city police to arrest African Americans at will. Authorities grabbed more than three hundred people, and crowds continued to threaten the prisoners’ safety even after they arrived at the city jail. The mob remained on the offensive that night, charging into the office of the Philanthropist and throwing the printing press into the river before continuing on to destroy Black-owned properties and assault Black residents. The next day, a Sunday, Governor Thomas Corwin arrived in the city. The mob’s energies waned as duly constituted authorities took charge. The Black prisoners were required either to prove their “nativity” in Ohio, show ...