{ "item_title" : "Until Justice Be Done", "item_author" : [" Kate Masur "], "item_description" : "The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states' insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement's ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.Kate Masur's magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois black laws helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/32/400/593/1324005939_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "32.00", "online_price" : "32.00", "our_price" : "32.00", "club_price" : "32.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Until Justice Be Done

The history of the abolitionist movement in antebellum America is generally well known. Most Americans have heard about the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Northerners’ opinions about slavery, and they’ve read about the underground railroad. Recent novels, movies and television series have also heightened public awareness of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown.

There was also a struggle to win civil rights for free Black people in the North during this time, but that history has been more obscure—until now. Kate Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern University, brings this critical chapter of our history to light in Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction.

Masur’s scholarly but accessible history demonstrates how thoroughly racism pervaded both the North and the South during the 19th century. New states, including so-called “free states” such as Ohio, Illinois and Oregon, tried to prohibit free African Americans from buying land or settling within their borders. Black sailors who ended up in Southern ports were frequently jailed until they could prove their free status—and often enslaved and sold when they couldn’t pay the costs of their imprisonment. Most states prevented Black people from testifying in court against white Americans, and only a handful allowed Black men to vote.

Most importantly, Until Justice Be Done demonstrates that the fight for equality and justice is as old as the republic itself. With meticulous research, Masur lays out the history of Black Americans’ struggle to be recognized as citizens—a struggle that started before the ink on the Constitution was dry. Their fight set the stage for the formation and victory of the antislavery Republican Party in 1861; the Emancipation Proclamation; the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; and the first Civil Rights Act.

While these activists’ victories weren’t total—many of their achievements were later reversed—their efforts laid essential groundwork for future generations, including our own. Masur’s book is both instructive and inspiring as it charts the path to freedom from the 1800s to today.