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

by Kate Masur

David Smith, an itinerant AME minister, recalled of the early 1830s that Black “churches and houses were stoned and many were compelled to sell out and go to Canada.… The mean and fiendish treatment the colored people received from the low class of whites, encouraged and urged on by the intelligent and wealthy, can not be described.”30 Town leaders denied to traveling white abolitionists the use of venues where they could lecture. Hostile crowds harassed and assaulted white speakers, often throwing rocks and running them out of town. The threat to Black activists was even more acute. Black Ohioans, activist or not, were vulnerable to claims that they were illegally residing in the state, that they had not registered and posted bonds according to the law. They were subject to eviction and abuse, and the racist testimony law severely limited their access to the courts. White Ohioans, seeing Black people as consummate outsiders, readily turned to mob action. Although lawless by definition, violent mobs complemented the black laws. The mobs’ purpose, like that of the laws themselves, was to maintain or restore what their participants believed was the proper social order.