Also, many states in the Northwest passed laws prohibiting or limiting the migration of Afro-Americans into their territory. An Illinois law said that anyone who entered the state illegally could be whipped and sold at auction. Many states denied blacks the ballot, prohibited their serving on a jury and legally segregated transportation, restaurants, hotels, theaters, churches, and even cemeteries. Most Northern states did not allow them to testify in court against whites. This meant that, if a white man beat a black, the black had no legal protection unless another white was willing to testify on his behalf. On several occasions white hostility erupted into violence. Black workmen were harassed, abolitionists beaten, and entire communities terrorized. One of the worst of these events occurred in Cincinnati in 1829. With the rapid growth of "Little Africa," that city's black ghetto, the local citizens decided to enforce the state's anti-integration legislation. Some twenty years before, the state had passed a law requiring blacks entering the state to provide proof of their freedom and to post a bond as guarantee of their good behavior. When the inhabitants of "Little Africa" obtained an extension of the 30-day time limit within which they were to comply with the law, the citizens of Cincinnati were outraged, and they took matters into their own hands. White mobs ransacked the area, indiscriminately and mercilessly beating women and children, looting stores and burning houses. It was estimated that half of the two thousand inhabitants of the area left the city. Many of them emigrated to Canada, and the local paper, which had helped to inflame the mob, lamented that the respectable black citizens had left and only derelicts remained. At the very point in American history when democracy was sinking its roots deeper into the national soil, the status of the Afro-American was being clearly defined as an inferior one. The Jacksonian Era brought the common man into new prominence, but the same privileges were not extended to the blacks. In the South, society was strengthening the institution of slavery against any possible recurrences of slave insurrections. The activities of the slaves, especially those of Negro preachers, were being watched even more closely than before. In the North, both state and federal laws denied blacks many of the rights of citizenship. PART TWO Emancipation Without Freedom Chapter 5 A Nation Divided Black Moderates And Black Militants