“We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less:” The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction by Hugh Davis (review)

Hugh Davis’s important study of northern African Americans’ struggle for equal rights during Reconstruction focuses on the role black activists played in combating northern white racism and redefining American citizenship from the Civil War onward. Davis argues that Reconstruction was national, rather than purely southern, in scope and that historians should approach it as such to better understand the era’s success and failures regarding African Americans’ political and social status. Specifically, he contends that Reconstruction began in the North when African Americans started pressuring the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals of equality. Northern blacks were key to the Reconstruction narrative as “significant agents of change” who sought to harness the emancipationist ideals unleashed by the Civil War and direct those ideals toward creating a more equal society that would grant them full citizenship rights (2). To achieve this objective, they centered on black male suffrage and equal access to, and desegregation of, public schools.

Northern blacks’ quest for equality began with antebellum-era institutions, like the National Negro Convention movement, and through cooperation with white abolitionists, whose paternalistic and often prejudiced views toward blacks sometimes resulted in a strained relationship between the two groups. During the Civil War, emancipation and black service in the Union army gave many northern African Americans hope that the war would bring equality, but the existence of continued discrimination soon led activists to view suffrage rights, economic self-sufficiency, and equality before the law, rather than emancipation, as the keys to gaining equal rights. Davis identifies the October 1864 National Convention of Colored Men, held in Syracuse, New York, as the launching point of the northern black equal rights movement. The National Equal Right League (NERL) emerged from the convention to coordinate the cause by organizing a network of auxiliaries across the North and in most southern states, who, despite sometimes quarrelling over tactics, lobbied to repeal discriminatory laws at the state and local level. The most active of these groups was the Pennsylvania branch, whose efforts helped outlaw discrimination in the Philadelphia transit system in 1867.

After the Civil War, state organizations promoted black suffrage through newspapers, speeches, and legislative petitions. Activists also lobbied Republican politicians to pass suffrage laws, and some took the issue to the courts. When these efforts met with only limited success at the state level, they brought the fight to Washington but were disappointed when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 excluded black suffrage. A lack of Republican support on the issue chafed black activists who, lacking any viable alternatives, grudgingly stuck with the party. In addition to pushing for suffrage, African Americans also pressed for access to integrated public schools. Facing recalcitrant school boards, they argued to state courts and legislatures that exclusion of blacks from public education was unconstitutional. Despite some success in states like Rhode Island and Minnesota, however, school segregation continued into the 1870s. When the Fifteenth Amendment finally brought limited black male suffrage, activists lobbied federal officials to support Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights bill, which passed in 1875 without its crucial school integration clause. Continued Republican foot dragging on this matter frustrated advocates who accused the party of taking black votes for granted. By the late 1870s, black activists were proud of the qualified successes they achieved on their two core issues, but ensuring the long-term viability of these laws after the Republican retreat from Reconstruction carried the struggle well into the 1880s.

For sources, Davis relies on African American newspapers, government documents, notes from black state and national meetings and conventions, petitions, and black and white activists’ personal correspondence. His prose is clear and succinct, and he succeeds eminently in presenting a rich synthesis of the black equal rights struggle across the Reconstruction North. That said, readers may...