Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T01:33:43.202Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Arnesen, Eric. 2009. Reconsidering the “Long Civil Rights Movement.” Historically Speaking, April, 3134.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Jerold S. 1966. Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs‐Merill Company.Google Scholar
Biondi, Martha. 2006. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brattain, Michelle. 2001. The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cha‐Jua, Keita Sundiata, and Lang, Clarence. 2007. The “Long Movement” as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies. Journal of African American History 92 (Spring): 265–88.Google Scholar
Clark, Kenneth. 1955. Prejudice and Your Child. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Dalfiume, Richard. 1968. The “Forgotten Years” of the Negro Revolution. Journal of American History 55:90106.Google Scholar
Dawley, Alan. 1975. Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
DuBois, W. E. B. 1988 1935. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Dudziak, Mary. 2004. Brown as a Cold War Case. Journal of American History 91 (June): 3242.Google Scholar
Geary, Daniel. 2003. Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934–1943. Journal of American History 90 (December): 912–34.Google Scholar
Gerstle, Gary. 1994. The Protean Character of American Liberalism. American Historical Review 99 (4): 1043–73.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Glenda. 2008. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa L. 2007. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Guinier, Lani. 2004. From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest‐Divergence Dilemma. Journal of American History 91 (June): 92118.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert. 1977. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Hall, Jacquelyn. 2005. The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past. Journal of American History 91 (March): 1233–63.Google Scholar
Herman, Ellen. 1995. The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. 2008. Introduction to Forum: “Poking Holes in Balloons”: New Approaches to Cold War Civil Rights. University of Illinois Law and History Review 26 (Summer): 319–25.Google Scholar
Korstad, Robert. 2007. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid‐Twentieth‐Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Korstad, Robert, and Lichtenstein, Nelson. 1988. Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement. Journal of American History 75 (December): 786811.Google Scholar
Lee, Sophia. 2008. Forum: “Poking Holes in Balloons”: New Approaches to Cold War Civil Rights: Hotspots in a Cold War: The NAACP's Postwar Workplace Contractualism, 1948–1964. University of Illinois Law and History Review 26 (Summer): 327–77.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, Nelson. 1998. Taft‐Hartley: A Slave Labor Law? Catholic University Law Review 47 (3): 763–89.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, Nelson. 2006. Herbert Hill in History and Contention. LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3 (2): 2531.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, Nelson. 2009. The Retail Revolution: How Wal‐Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
MacLean, Nancy. 2006. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Meany, George. 1947. The Taft‐Hartley Law: A Slave Labor Measure. Vital Speeches of the Day 14:118–20.Google Scholar
Montgomery, David. 1988. The Fall of the House of Labor. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Bruce. 2001. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Payne, Charles M. 2004. “The Whole United States is Southern!”: Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race. Journal of American History 91 (June): 8391.Google Scholar
Pope, James Gray. 2002. The Thirteenth Amendment versus the Commerce Clause: Labor and the Shaping of American Constitutional Law, 1921–1957. Columbia Law Review 102 (January): 3122.Google Scholar
Reed, Linda. 1991. Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938–1963. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Roediger, David. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Sallee, Shelley. 2004. The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Daryl Michael. 1997. Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Sitkoff, Harvard. 1978. A New Deal for Blacks: the Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Patricia. 1996. Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Tyson, Timothy. 2001. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Wilentz, Sean. 1982. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1950. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).Google Scholar
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).Google Scholar
United States v. Carolene Products Company, 304 U.S. 144 (1938).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pub. L. No. 88–352, title VII, 1942 U.S.C. section 2002e et seq.Google Scholar