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

by Kate Masur

Barring African Americans from gaining a “legal settlement” was tantamount to saying they were not eligible for poor relief. Black Ohioans who had nowhere else to turn still remained vulnerable to the whims of local officials, who could, if they chose, deny them access to relief funds or even remove them from their communities. The new law’s race-neutral coda, which barred from the state people who were “likely to become” economically dependent, suggested how legislators readily moved from race-specific prohibitions—which the new legislation mostly condemned—to race-neutral ones that could be used to serve the same purposes. As in Pennsylvania in 1814, the Ohio legislature showed a kind of flexibility about categories of race and class that later served southern legislatures after the Civil War. The language of class-based discrimination could help recoup what was lost when race-based provisions were repealed.