There are several themes that emerge in this excellent book. The first has to do with how African-Americans led the struggle Masur describes, even as racially discriminatory laws made them vulnerable — whether to the whims of local officials exerting their discretion or to white mobs seeking legal cover for anti-Black violence. Another concerns how the language of race and class was, as Masur puts it, 'fungible': Even after the Civil War, legislation cracking down on 'vagrancy' and 'vagabondage' allowed state legislatures in the former Confederacy to practice discrimination under cover of laws that seemed 'race-neutral.' So much in this history was contingent; so much could turn on a single word. Toward the end of her book, Masur describes the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1866, when senators haggled over who would be protected against racial discrimination, deciding to replace the inclusive word 'inhabitants' with the more restrictive 'citizens.' ... If this is a cleareyed book, it’s still a heartening one. Masur takes care to show not only the limitations of what was achieved at each step but also how even the smallest step could lead to another.

Masur wants to know what led increasingly influential politicians to adopt the view that Black people ought to 'have all the rights and privileges and immunities' that 'every citizen' had. In Masur’s account, the answer is a now-forgotten social mobilization of Black civil rights advocates who fought alongside White allies not only to undermine slavery but to establish basic equality for Blacks in the free states of the North ... Masur’s heroes are the social activists ... Masur’s book illuminates just how much was at stake in the fight over Black citizenship ... Masur’s fresh perspective lets us see famous episodes in a new light ... Masur’s book is a brilliant meditation on progress and its limits. Activists creatively targeted weak spots in the Constitution. In the 14th Amendment, they essentially established a second American republic ... Masur’s monumental account leaves no doubt that a generation of 19th-century racial egalitarians altered history. They forced white supremacists to change course, and they created resources used ever since by advocates in the fight for equality.

Prodigiously researching legislative and court records, pamphlets, petitions, and the press, [Masur] has shaped a remarkable and shattering book, a worthy successor to Ira Berlin’s 1974 Slaves Without Masters. Ms. Masur’s monumental account focuses not only on government-sanctioned pre-Civil War racism, but on the efforts by black activists and their white allies to compel America to make good on the 'created equal' pledge in the Declaration of Independence ... Much of the previous literature on the early struggles for racial equity has understandably focused on the movement to end slavery. In opening a window onto the suffering long endured by freedmen, Ms. Masur fills a vital gap in our understanding of this period. Combining meticulous scholarship with chilling storytelling, her book should mortify any reader who still doubts that America was in many ways built on a foundation of white supremacy and black oppression .. If most of what Ms. Masur discusses after 1858 feels anticlimactic, it is only because the story of postwar disillusionment is familiar, and the early saga breathtakingly fresh ... Speaking of fresh: do not look for Lincoln or Frederick Douglass to dominate this book. Instead, Ms. Masur introduces unsung heroes to vivify her saga. Agonizing as it is to read, it is no longer possible to ignore.

Masur is another in a valiant legion of historians who continue to fill in gaps in our knowledge of the ancestry of American fascism from southern slave-owners to present-day insurrectionists, the defiant Know-Nothings who have never held allegiance to democratic principles when they challenged racial hegemony. Her work also reminds us that America has always garnered more loyalty from Black Americans, pushing the nation to fulfill its egalitarian promises, than the nation has shown them in return. That yin and yang of our schizophrenic political system continues to play out in a tension that we seem far from resolving.

Masur’s scholarly but accessible history demonstrates how thoroughly racism pervaded both the North and the South during the 19th century ... Most importantly, Until Justice Be Done demonstrates that the fight for equality and justice is as old as the republic itself. With meticulous research, Masur lays out the history of Black Americans’ struggle to be recognized as citizens—a struggle that started before the ink on the Constitution was dry ... Masur’s book is both instructive and inspiring as it charts the path to freedom from the 1800s to today.

Throughout her clearly written and compelling book, Masur makes the essential point that definitions and protections of civil rights was largely a struggle carried on in the states, before the Civil War and Reconstruction invested the federal government with such an interest ... At a time when definitions of citizenship and civil rights are again under assault, Masur’s careful accounting of the ways Americans came to understand such terms provides an informed perspective to appreciate that such concepts never were, and thus never are, self-evident. They require due diligence and vigilance to secure and sustain at all levels of government. An essential book.

The struggle against racist oppression in the antebellum North is excavated in this illuminating history ... Masur also explores the growth of a multiracial civil rights movement that braved mob violence to challenge these measures through protests, action in state legislatures and Congress, and increasingly powerful antislavery political parties. She tells this complex story in lucid prose that brings out the drama of charged racial politics while insightfully analyzing the era’s tortured constitutional theorizing about states’ rights and Black citizenship. This engrossing study goes beyond sectionalist accounts of the South’s peculiar institution to show how racism and civil rights activism have shaped every corner of America.

A well-respected scholar of racial issues in 19th-century America offers a history of 'the first civil rights revolution.' ... Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern, chronicles the efforts by Black and White Americans, from the Revolution through the 1870s, to end slavery and racial discrimination ... Though Masur focuses on the Old Northwest, she does not exclude major nodes of activism such as Missouri and Massachusetts ... Masur fittingly closes with a sobering lesson for today—i.e., that the gains of constitutionalized manumission and equal rights were reversed by the Supreme Court starting in 1873 and ending in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It required a second civil rights movement decades later to reignite Americans to further work ... the author could have provided more on the role of religion in awakening Americans to racial injustices as well as on the general context of social reform in antebellum America ... A fine history of the first phase of the nation’s most enduring moral reform effort.