-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Richard M. Valelly, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C., Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 3, December 2011, Pages 838–839, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar491
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
In this deeply researched monograph on Reconstruction in Washington, D.C., Kate Masur connects three stories. One concerns the actions of black Washingtonians to define their civic status during and after emancipation. Another traces the alarmed reactions of local white conservatives, white laborers in competition for municipal jobs, and congressional Democrats. A third story is how a Republican-controlled Congress legally and institutionally reshaped the district, eventually frustrating the democratic promise of what black Washingtonians accomplished.
Reconstruction opened the opportunity for a new public sphere in the district; freedpeople then seized it. Their Arendtian politicization of public venues—hotels, theaters, sidewalks, streetcars, the White House lawn, the Capitol and its galleries—were, in a phrase Masur borrows from Charles Sumner, “an example for all the land” (p. 5). New and long-standing black institutions—churches, schools, newspapers, literary societies, trade unions, and, eventually, ward clubs—supported continuously active assertion of a new view of American citizenship. A local black elite, black Union veterans, and legal defense work by Freedmen's Bureau lawyers in the local courts also helped. In a very original legal-historical twist, Masur shows that the resulting fraught, everyday politics altered the boundary between a semi-feudal common law and a modern law of citizenship.
