Abstract: This study recounts how black northerners reconciled their lofty expectations following the Emancipation Proclamation with the enduring and pervasive racial injustice that characterized life in the northern states. To appreciate what it meant to for these men and women to live in the North between 1863 and 1883, is to focus on black efforts to create and support their own institutions, exercise and extend their political and legal rights, educate and affirm their children, and protect and provide for their families. Accounting for the prejudice, disfranchisement, and violence black northerners confronted are all critical aspects of the analysis, but these themes yield to a more significant one—the manner in which they responded to their situation during this period. To that end this study emphasizes the role that newspapers, political organizations, labor unions, schools, churches, businesses, social institutions, and fraternal orders played in allowing northern blacks to be more than spectators in their own lives. Black northerners felt confident that Union victory in the Civil War would elevate their political, economic, and social status. While the plight of four million ex-slaves rightfully commanded the nation's attention, northern blacks believed that their rights and opportunities would be expanded as well. Since they already enjoyed physical freedom, the next logical step was to achieve racial equality. The twenty years following the Emancipation Proclamation, however, proved profoundly disappointing. By 1883, black northerners still confronted political marginalization, limited economic prospects, and pervasive social injustice. Legislative efforts such as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the 1875 Civil Rights Act proved ineffective against overwhelming white northern prejudice. As a result, black northerners increasingly turned their attention to fortifying their own communities and supporting their own institutions even as they continued to fight for social equality. Moreover, by the late 1870s they began to embrace black nationalism as the most logical and effective means to assert their humanity and push beyond mere freedom.