"Until Justice Be Done" by Kate Masur is the extensive history of the Civil Rights Movement leading up to and through the Emancipation Proclamation. I read a lot about Civil Rights, slavery, and racism in America, but Masur presents a history that is entirely new to me. This really well-researched book highlights how people, both Black and white, had been fighting for greater freedom in a way that was previously unknown to me through the early and mid 19th century. The book discusses the fight for the freedom and corresponding rights of free and formerly enslaved Black people, which was especially pronounced in states like Ohio that bordered with the slave state of Kentucky. "Until Justice Be Done" is a great complement to books about the 20th and 21st century Civil Rights Movements.

Do you think it’s enough for laws not to discriminate based on race? Or should laws also be analyzed for their effects on different races?
This is an important question for today’s world, as mass incarceration has had a massively disproportional effect on the Black community while laws are forbidden to discriminate based on race. But it is also the basis of the most recent civil rights movement of the 1960s. Poll taxes and literacy tests did not explicitly discriminate based on race, but the effects were both clear and purposeful. But one movement, one that began over a century beforehand, made that later movement both possible and necessary. That is the first civil rights movement, the one that lasted from roughly the founding of our nation to the end of the era of Reconstruction. That movement is the subject of Kate Masur’s brilliant new book, Until Justice Be Done, which chronicles both the struggle to abolish slavery and the struggle to earn equal rights and citizenship to free Blacks in the states. Masur does wonderful work in pointing out not only what made the movement victorious but also the shortcomings that made the later civil rights movement an imperative.

The intense focus of the first civil rights movement is a large part of what made it successful, according to Masur. In her conclusion, she makes it clear both what that focus was and where the ideas came from. She writes:
The first civil rights movement focused acutely on the problem of racial discrimination. Its spokespeople often began with the biblical concept that God had made all races of mankind “of one blood” and therefore that shared humanity was more important than superficial differences in physical features. They also insisted that it was unjust and immoral to group people by race because a person’s race did not determine their behavior or their moral worth, and because doing so elided meaningful differences.
This theme is present throughout. For one, religious leaders are present throughout the book, and their influence in fighting racial discrimination is a helpful palette-cleanser to the also-true narrative that Christians were among the worst offenders when it came to racial discrimination. But the theme of racial discrimination is so important when understanding the scope of this 19th-century movement. If overt discrimination could be curtailed, they believed, then racial differences would be defeated. So that intense focus, in many ways, brought victory. It eventually brought the abolition of slavery and the reformation of many state laws throughout the North and the South. Masur narrates this story with great detail at the same time as intense attention to the aspects of the story that truly matter.
Yet the laser-focused nature of the first civil rights movement left much work unfinished for the second. Masur is clear in her analysis. Again: “the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement echoed and expanded the agenda of its antebellum predecessor.” Why did this expansion of the agenda need to happen? Because the status quo was too beneficial for powerful whites to let overt discrimination be the only tactic used to keep that status safe. “Black codes” gave rise to laws that prohibited “vagrancy” or didn’t allow “vagrants” to settle in certain areas. So where was a newly-freed Black man supposed to settle? These workarounds eventually led to Jim Crow laws as well.
So what do we do with the first civil rights movement? Masur does not vacillate on its essentiality. In the introduction, she writes:
If the movement did not bequeath to us the nation many of us would have wished for, it is also important to remember the immensity of the inequities it opposed, stemming from more than two centuries of racial slavery and the vision of white supremacy on which it rested. At every turn, those who have advanced the struggle to overcome that legacy have encountered staunch and often violent resistance. And yet, as nineteenth-century proponents of racial equality in civil rights well understood, we are better off without racist laws than with them, and better struggling for justice in a multiracial society than rejecting the possibility that one could exist.
So the first was necessary for the second. And it is important to recognize the failures of the first not because we want to critique it, but to realize the limitations of any revolution. People can only tolerate so much change. People can only focus on so many things at once. As a matter of fact, horrific violence against Black citizens in the wake of the first Civil Rights Act (most notably in Memphis) showed just how resistant white supremacists were to change.
Masur’s narrative of the major inflection points of America’s first civil rights movement will help you see connections to the 20th century as well as the 21st. She expertly weaves the important thematic threads through bits of history I never knew about, and she never gets distracted from her goal. If you read a good bit of history, you’ll appreciate the depth of Until Justice Be Done and the refreshing local flavor of much of the narrative. Movements start local and become national, and it is never more apparent than here. Maybe that’s something we can employ to begin to heal our ongoing racial divide.
I received a review copy of Until Justice Be Done courtesy of W. W. Norton and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

Until Justice Be Done extends the chronology of the First Reconstruction backwards in time through the early American republic. Historian Kate Masur takes traditional Reconstruction characteristics such as Black Codes and demonstrates that they began as early as 1803 in “free” states. Her analysis ranges across Ohio, Massachusetts, Illinois, and elsewhere, while at the same time, a biracial movement engaged in grassroots activism to combat enslavement. Until Justice Be Done portrays the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation as less of a turning point in African American history because severe injustice and anti-Black racism continued through the entire nineteenth century through today.

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me to read this book. This book begins in the early 1800's. This book was an inspirational tale of what individuals endured during the 1800's and the individuals who stood up for what they believed in.

Masur's book does a great job looking at a part of history that is often overlooked. We tend to think that, out of nowhere, an abolitionist fervor developed, leading to a civil war. This was then, according to this narrative, followed by a civil rights movement almost 100 years later.

Proof that this narrative is wrong can be found in these pages. For one, she argues that there was a structured movement towards equality, not just abolition, prior to the civil war; second, she always makes the case that it was the work of these early civil rights proponents that laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

A really in-depth shift of perspective that adds layers to the existing historiography. This is one of those books that cannot be compared to anything else, for it is in a category of its own.