Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
Kate Masur
W. W. Norton & Company
Masur's magisterial history documents the civil rights movement in the decades before the Civil War. It is a magnificent contribution to the history of antiracism in America. Beginning in opposition of laws enacted in 1803 denying rights to free African Americans, African American activists and their allies courageously built a movement to fight racist laws. Pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections.