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

Kate Masur, Northwestern University in conversation with Edward Ayers

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Many free states enacted laws that restricted African Americans' rights and movement. But over time, African American activists and their white allies built a movement to fight these racist laws. Pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women battled in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed the movement’s vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. Kate Masur and Edward Ayers will discuss Masur’s book, Until Justice Be Done, a pathbreaking new history of this early civil rights movement and it’s landmark achievements.