The lost promise of civil rights / Risa L. Goluboff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goluboff, Risa Lauren, 1971- author.

Contributor:

American Council of Learned Societies.

Series:

ACLS Fellows’ publications.

ACLS Humanities E-Book.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Civil rights--History--20th century.

African Americans.

Civil rights movements--United States--History--20th century.

Civil rights movements.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 376 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Listen to a short interview with Risa GoluboffHost: 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.

Contents:

Transition, uncertainty, and the conditions for a new civil rights

Claiming rights in the agricultural South

Claiming rights in the industrial economy

The work of civil rights in the Department of Justice

A new deal for civil rights

Work and workers in the NAACP

Litigating labor in the wartime NAACP

Eliminating work from the NAACP's legal strategy

Brown and the remaking of civil rights.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780674258075

067425807X

OCLC:

712082613