Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Abstract

Though every civil rights advance of previous decades was not reversed, many were. National recognition of a revived states’ rights doctrine, manifest in “separate but equal,” would assure policies of white supremacy for generations. By giving legitimacy to segregation in education, employment, housing, and public accommodations, supremacist policies nearly erased the bravery, idealism, and accomplishments of the first civil rights movement that Kate Masur so insightfully chronicles. Segregation masquerading as “separate but equal” rights supplied legitimacy for race discrimination. After Plessy, though new generations of activists opposed segregation in the United States Post Office and the United States armed forces, no congress and no president would challenge segregation until confronted by comparison with the Nazi regime.