The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

• Used Book in Good Condition

<p>Listen to a short interview with Risa GoluboffHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane</p><p>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 <i>Brown v. Board of Education</i> 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 <i>Brown</i>, 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 <i>Brown</i>, however, they had eliminated workers' economic concerns from their litigation agenda. When the lawyers succeeded in <i>Brown</i>, 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 <i>Brown</i> only partially fulfilled the promise of civil rights.</p>