The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

by Goluboff, Risa L.

• ISBN13: 9780674034693
• ISBN10: 0674034694
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Listen to a short interview with Risa Goluboff Host: Chris Gondek Producer: Heron & CraneIn this groundbreaking book, Risa L. Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education has long dominated that history. Since 1954, generations of judges, lawyers, and ordinary people have viewed civil rights as a project of breaking down formal legal barriers to integration, especially in the context of public education. Goluboff recovers a world before Brown, a world in which civil rights was legally, conceptually, and constitutionally up for grabs. Then, the petitions of black agricultural workers in the American South and industrial workers across the nation called for a civil rights law that would redress economic as well as legal inequalities. Lawyers in the new Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice and in the NAACP took the workers' cases and viewed them as crucial to attacking Jim Crow. By the time NAACP lawyers set out on the path to Brown, however, they had eliminated workers' economic concerns from their litigation agenda. When the lawyers succeeded in Brown, they simultaneously marginalized the host of other harms--economic inequality chief among them--that afflicted the majority of African Americans during the mid-twentieth century. By uncovering the lost challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the promise of civil rights.

Author Biography

Risa L. Goluboff is Professor of Law and History at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations Used in the Text	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Transition, Uncertainty, and the Conditions for a New Civil Rights	p. 16
Claiming Rights in the Agricultural South	p. 51
Claiming Rights in the Industrial Economy	p. 81
The Work of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice	p. 111
A New Deal for Civil Rights	p. 141
Work and Workers in the NAACP	p. 174
Litigating Labor in the Wartime NAACP	p. 198
Eliminating Work from the NAACP's Legal Strategy	p. 217
Brown and the Remaking of Civil Rights	p. 238
Notes	p. 273
Acknowledgments	p. 361
Index	p. 365
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