The half-century before the Civil War was filled with conflicts concerning equality as well as freedom. Starting in 1803, many free states passed laws discouraging free African Americans from settling within their borders and limited their rights to testify in court, to move freely from place to place, to work, to vote, and to attend public schools.

Over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing violence from mobs, courageously built a movement to fight against these racist laws. They argued to the states that they were simply trying to maintain internal peace, with promises of equal rights found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They included ministers, writers, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, who fought in the press, courts, state governments, and Congress through petitions, lobbying, party politics, and elections.

Longblocked by hostile white majorities and unfavorable judicial decisions, the ideals of the movement became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, especially among supporters of the new Republican Party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans enshrined this vision of racial equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were landmark successes of the first civil rights movement.

The captivating story of Kate Masur delivers this pioneering movement with vivid details. Activists like John Jones, a free black trader from North Carolina, whose resistance to Illinois’s “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, the promises of legal equality were not enough. However, the antebellum movement laid the groundwork for a tradition of racial justice that remains vital to this day.