Newberry Library | America’s First Civil Rights Movement

Join us for a discussion with scholar Kate Masur, whose new book reconsiders the history of the nation’s earliest federal civil rights measures: the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

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. In her book, Masur traces the struggle by African American activists and their white allies as they petitioned for greater racial equality and fought these racist laws.

Joining Masur in conversation about her work is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University.

Kate Masur is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University. She specializes in the history of race, politics, and law in the nineteenth-century United States. Her other books include An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2010), and, with Gregory Downs, The World the Civil War Made (UNC Press, 2015).

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016.