This is the fourth installment in an occasional series that will focus on slavery, the Constitution and the current debate over the meaning of America’s founding. The most recent episode featured a conversation with historians Sean Wilentz and James Oakes.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he invoked the historic struggle to make America a more equal society. That struggle did not begin in the 20th century, or even in the 19th century.
The first civil rights movement emerged from the radical impulses of the American Revolution, and it initiated conflicts over slavery and the place of Black people in the free states as soon as the Constitution was ratified.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian and 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist Kate Masur opens a window into a bygone era when Americans of all races thought deeply about and fought over the words in our founding documents. The ratification of the Constitution, with its deference to states’ rights, unleashed a dynamic process in which the definitions of citizenship and civil rights had to be worked out.
“There is a long tradition in the United States of being interested in the history of the Constitution, the Constitution’s relationship to slavery, and Americans are kind of obsessed with our Constitution,” Ms. Masur said. “The original Constitution is also very ambiguous on questions about slavery in particular.”
That ambiguity offered an opportunity for free Black people and their White allies to assert that the Constitution, despite its concessions to slavery, embodied the fundamental values of liberty and equality. It also contained clauses, such as the privileges and immunities clause in Section IV, Article II, that supported the rights of free African Americans regardless of which state they lived in or traveled to.
In this story there are many setbacks, but also progress. And the movement’s most important immediate goal, the destruction of slavery, was achieved with the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Listen to the full conversation with Ms. Masur by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
