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

Published Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London : Harvard University Press, 2009 ©2007

Click on the following:
ACLS Humanities E-Book

Copies

Description 1 online resource (viii, 376 pages) 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 Summary In 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 Notes Includes index Subject National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- History -- 20th century SUBJECT National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fast Subject Civil rights movements -- United States -- History -- 20th century African Americans -- Employment -- Law and legislation -- History -- 20th century LAW / Civil Rights African Americans -- Employment -- Law and legislation Civil rights movements Race relations SUBJECT United States -- Race relations -- History -- 20th century Subject United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780674258075 067425807X

  Permalink