The struggle for Black civil rights didn’t begin with Martin Luther King Jr. but in the American revolution, writes Kate Masur. In Until Justice Be Done, the Northwestern University history professor explores the people and organizations campaigning against discriminatory laws in the Northern states. Although slavery wasn’t allowed in Ohio, Blacks weren’t allowed to vote and could only reside in the state if two white landowners vouched for them.
The struggle to overturn such lower status was eventually led by the liberal Republican Party, whose member gained “a vocabulary and a set of principles that they translated into national policy” after the Civil War. It was an uphill battle against the conservative Democratic Party, whose Northern members viewed Blacks as vagrants and paupers, “potentially disruptive” people who would never achieve parity with white America. The first civil rights movement was all about coalition building—with Blacks pushing harder than white allies were willing to accept.
