Until Justice Be Done Americas First Civil Rights Movement From The Revolution To Reconstruction

Download or read book Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction written by Kate Masur and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. 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.

Download or read book An Example for All the Land written by Kate Masur and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Example for All the Land reveals Washington, D.C. as a laboratory for social policy in the era of emancipation and the Civil War. In this panoramic study, Kate Masur provides a nuanced account of African Americans' grassroots activism, municipal politics, and the U.S. Congress. She tells the provocative story of how black men's right to vote transformed local affairs, and how, in short order, city reformers made that right virtually meaningless. Bringing the question of equality to the forefront of Reconstruction scholarship, this widely praised study explores how concerns about public and private space, civilization, and dependency informed the period's debate over rights and citizenship.

Download or read book The Civil Rights Movement written by John O'Mara and published by Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rights of a nation's citizens are civil rights. In the 1950s and 1960s, black Americans organized a movement to demand these rights, including equal education, the right to vote, and many other freedoms. This significant and accessible volume takes readers through the key events of the movement, including its victories and disappointments. Central figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X are featured, and a timeline helps readers understand the movement's progression.

Download or read book The First Reconstruction written by Van Gosse and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 759 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.

Download or read book If Your Back's Not Bent written by Dorothy F. Cotton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Director of the Citizenship Education Program, Dorothy Cotton, recounts the accomplishments of the program and her experiences in the civil rights movement.

Download or read book Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South written by Brian Ward and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling book offers important new insights into the connections among radio, race relations, and the civil rights and black power movements in the South from the 1920s to the mid-1970s. For the mass of African Americans--and many whites--living in the region during this period, radio was the foremost source of news and information. Consequently, it is impossible to fully understand the origins and development of the African American freedom struggle, changes in racial consciousness, and the transformation of southern racial practices without recognizing how radio simultaneously entertained, informed, educated, and mobilized black and white southerners. While focusing on civil rights activities in Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and the state of Mississippi, the book draws attention to less well-known sites of struggle such as Columbus, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina, where radio also played a vital role. It explains why key civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and organizations such as the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC put a premium on access to the radio, often finding it far more effective than the print media or television in advancing their cause. The book also documents how civil rights advocates used radio to try to influence white opinions on racial matters in the South and beyond, and how the broadcasting industry itself became the site of a protracted battle for black economic opportunity and access to a lucrative black consumer market. In addition, Ward rescues from historical obscurity a roster of colorful deejays, announcers, station managers, executives, and even the odd federal bureaucrat, who made significant contributions to the freedom struggle through radio. Winner of the AEJMC award for the best journalism and mass communication history book of 2004 and a 2004 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, this book restores radio to its rightful place in the history of black protest, race relations, and southern culture during the middle fifty years of the 20th century.

Download or read book Self-Evident Truths written by Richard D. Brown and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a distinguished historian, a detailed and compelling examination of how the early Republic struggled with the idea that “all men are created equal” How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows that despite its founding statement that “all men are created equal,” the early Republic struggled with every form of social inequality. While people paid homage to the ideal of equal rights, this ideal came up against entrenched social and political practices and beliefs. Brown illustrates how the ideal was tested in struggles over race and ethnicity, religious freedom, gender and social class, voting rights and citizenship. He shows how high principles fared in criminal trials and divorce cases when minorities, women, and people from different social classes faced judgment. This book offers a much-needed exploration of the ways revolutionary political ideas penetrated popular thinking and everyday practice.