Bind Us Apart: How the First American Liberals Invented Racial Segregation

Guyatt, a University of Cambridge history lecturer with expertise in U.S. race and religious history, examines how liberal voices in the formative years of the U.S. sought to end slavery and integrate Native Americans into white society. Working from primary sources, he clearly lays out how reformers intended to accomplish these obstacle-strewn goals. For African-Americans, the most radical approach was a path to full political emancipation and integration, but a competing approach hoped to facilitate colonization by a freed slave population in the western U.S. or Africa. Emancipation presented a conundrum because there was general agreement that slaves could not enter society until the “degradation” caused by slavery was reversed, but the most accepted mechanism for reversal was the wholly unrealistic “amalgamation”—a mixing of the races via intermarriage and interbreeding. It is Guyatt’s well-supported thesis that segregation was the default result of the failure of these strategies. Guyatt’s parallel treatment of efforts to integrate Native Americans details the challenges reformers faced, including the failure of the fledging government to honor negotiated treaties and Native Americans’ desires to maintain their lands and traditions. Guyatt’s documentation of the historic failure to integrate African-Americans and Native Americans into white society is a timely and instructive look at how deeply racism is embedded in America’s past. (May)