During the Civil War African Americans didn’t just demand citizenship. Against rejection, denial, and insult, they redefined it.

When the Civil War began, free black people had good reason to wonder whether the United States of America was even a good idea: It was the land of the Fugitive Slave Law, which left them vulnerable to enslavement; of the Dred Scott decision, which denied them national citizenship; and of state laws and constitutions, North and South, that excluded them or even threatened them with enslavement. Yet when South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and Lincoln called for volunteers, black men in cities across the free states assembled to volunteer their service.

They were refused, curtly and sometimes violently. The United States was a white man’s republic, and this was to be a white man’s war.

When the Union finally did come calling at the end of 1862, free black communities debated whether to participate. Some seized the opportunity to prove their worthiness and their patriotism, hoping to claim the citizenship they had long sought. Others urged a more defiant stand. Resist enlistment, they said, until the government promised equal pay, equal treatment, and black officers. But even those who chose to serve soon became dissidents as well, for the government soon broke its promise of equal pay. For more than a year, soldiers and their families protested, refusing to accept unequal wages. Many endured hardship. Some faced courts martial. A few were executed by their own army for their resistance.

These soldiers and protesters established African Americans’ claim to two kinds of citizenship—the citizenship of patriotic service, and the citizenship of principled dissent. With the first, they made it impossible to deny that African Americans participated in the destruction of slavery. With the second, they hitched that commitment to the principle of equality before the law. Constitutional amendments would soon write these ideas into the nation’s organic law. But African Americans were there first.

After the Civil War, the issue of women’s suffrage became completely entangled with the campaign for the 15th Amendment. In effect, radical Republicans sold out women’s rights activists in the name of passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing black male suffrage. As a result, the women’s rights movement suffered a dramatic split between activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, who refused to support an amendment that did not include suffrage for women; and other activists, such as Lucy Brown, Henry Blackwell, and Frederick Douglass, who were willing to defer the vote for women for the sake of enfranchising black men. Ultimately, both sides in this debate were thwarted: The Republicans did not honor their commitment to women’s suffrage and the 15th Amendment did not protect the franchise for black men. 

Teaching this material this semester, I was struck by the story of an 1867 Kansas referendum that would have enfranchised both black men and women, had it passed. Brown, Blackwell, Cady Stanton, and Anthony all campaigned for the Kansas referendum. That took a good deal of courage. They were treated horribly by misogynistic Republicans. In an attempt to taint the suffrage campaign with immorality and illegitimacy, for example, Republican spokesmen charged that Lucy Stone and Henry Ward were practitioners of “free love”; the “grounds” for this false accusation being that Stone had refused to take Blackwell’s name when the couple married. It took even more courage for the suffrage activists to decide how to make the best of an impossible situation—with Brown and Blackwell agreeing to sideline women’s suffrage for the sake of the 15th Amendment, and Cady Stanton and Anthony forming an ill-advised alliance with the likes of southern Democrat and racist, George Train, who viewed white women’s suffrage as a way of outvoting black men.

This episode to me epitomizes the complexity of racial and gender politics, and the way that competition for rights can obstruct the larger goal of equality under the law. It also illustrates the willingness of committed citizens to compromise perfection for the sake of progress, even at the cost of personal friendships and movement solidarity.

Until 1865, the United States had an enslaved population of about four million people, and the world’s wealthiest and most powerful slaveholder class. The Civil War brought this economic and social order—and system of racial control—tumbling down. The 14th and 15th amendments made freed people enfranchised citizens, in theory. But what did citizenship for former enslaved people really mean?

The northern white abolitionists of the American Missionary Association, or AMA, attempted to answer this question—and put promises into practice—by founding universities for black people, and by working to make them beacons of racial egalitarianism. Unlike many black schools, AMA colleges taught a classical curriculum that was intended to foster leadership and citizenship for former slaves. Some of the most prominent future leaders from the black community came from AMA institutions like Atlanta University and Fisk University in Nashville.

Atlanta University, founded in 1869, provided a refuge from the prevalent racism and white supremacy that enveloped the South. To some extent, the AMA educators there were creatures of their time. Although white women played a leading role, white men controlled the school. Black people did not begin teaching at Atlanta University until the 1890s, and white women ran the school until the 1920s. Nonetheless, AMA schoolmen also practiced, for the day, an unusual concept of racial equality. They encouraged students to shed the heritage of slavery, teaching racial equality. Classes were integrated—something strictly prohibited in Southern schools—with the children of white teachers present in classes and the dining room.

The educators’ quiet efforts made an impression on their students—a new generation of American citizens. Edmund Ware, a Yale graduate and abolitionist, served as the black college’s president for much of its early history. Soon after he arrived on campus in the late 1860s, one student took note of the courtesy with which Ware treated him. “It was a new and strange thing to us to see a white man carrying wood and making fires for us, who had been taught, by precept and example, that it was our business to do the like for his kind.” “However you may be mistreated in the city or elsewhere,” Ware was said to have informed students, “I want you to know that the moment you set foot on these grounds you are free men in a free country.”

The AMA’s impact on the struggle for African American citizenship is often underestimated, yet it was lasting. “This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro,” W. E. B. Du Bois, who attended Fisk University and taught at Atlanta University, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). “Not alms, but a friend; not cash, but character.” The AMA’s educational efforts were the “finest thing in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory.”

American citizens have done their part when they let youth lead the way—even when the public dismisses their demands as “unrealistic.”

On February 3, 1964, approximately 464,000 Black and Latinx (mainly Puerto Rican) students boycotted school and protested racial segregation and poor, overcrowded conditions in their schools. This was not in the Jim Crow South. It was in New York City. Led by Bayard Rustin and Milton Galamison, roughly half of all NYC students that day participated in the boycott. They marched out of roughly 300 of the city’s 860 public schools, and rallied at the Board of Education building in Brooklyn.

They demanded not just racial integration, but also textbooks that reflected African American and immigrant experiences, resources for a meaningful education, greater diversity among teachers, and reforms in pedagogical training. The school boycott focused on de facto segregation. The government ignored historical housing patterns to guarantee continued racial segregation. It didn’t need overtly racist laws or police chiefs, like “Bull” Connor in Birmingham, the boycotters said. Although the Central Board of Education failed to address the protestors’ demands for integration, the boycott helped to lay the foundation for a new movement—demanding community control for the schools they attended.

The struggles continue to this day; in 2009, New York reported the country’s highest concentration of Black and Latinx students in intensely-segregated public schools (with less than 10 percent white enrollment). Today, youth here continue to lead education organizing efforts, fighting the over-policing of schools and demanding a meaningful college preparatory education. Student groups now frequently mention the 2006 “Penguin Revolution” in Chile—when thousands of high schoolers pushed for education reform—and the plights of students in South Africa, and even Palestine. Like their predecessors in the 1960s, these young Americans want to shift the debate from being about themselves—whether they are good students, whether they are low-income, whether they “work hard enough”—to being about their schooling, and their place as citizens of the United States.