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

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Association ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Rights Division ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

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.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Laura Warren Hill
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
New York State ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
York State ◽  
The North ◽  
North And South

This chapter provides a background to the story of transformations brought by the rebellion of the Black community that happened first in Harlem, New York and then in Rochester on July 4, 1964. It points out that the rebellions in Rochester and Harlem shared a common spark: police brutality and misconduct. It also explains how the twin rebellions in New York State in 1964 were a foretaste of the Southern-based civil rights movement, which gave way to a different kind of Black political mobilization that centered largely in the urban North. The chapter reviews the consequences of the civil rights movement that dismantled Jim Crow as a system of legalized racism in the North and South. It emphasizes that the new Black political mobilization, which built on the energy arising from the rebellions and fashioning theories of a Black political economy, sought to address the structures of socioeconomic marginalization and impoverishment that survived the legal dismantling of Jim Crow.

Epilogue

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
First Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Right

Despite the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy still persisted in both the North and the South. The ‘Epilogue’ outlines the profound struggles by African Americans to make their freedom meaningful. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law and, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The modern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s began to impact on the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, but for many African Americans, struggles for equality, justice, and fairness continue into the twenty-first century.

Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Guzmán
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Border Town ◽  
Central Texas ◽  
International Boundary

In 1909, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. This book delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the man's own indefatigable courage, the book also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands—as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, this book explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.

The Lost Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Alternative Definition ◽  
To Come ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
Alternative Set ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter examines Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, which incorporates the perspective of labor and social historians who have posited the importance and power of a working-class-oriented civil rights movement in the 1940s. She finds that an alternative set of legal strategies and organizing initiatives was available to civil rights litigators, indeed that these more economically radical strategies were successfully deployed, and, that if they had been consistently pursued would have given this plebian civil rights orientation an embedded character in law and social policy during the decades to come. In effect, Goluboff posits in the most precise fashion an alternative definition to the meaning of what we have come to think of as civil rights law and litigation and then asks why this more proletarian version was marginalized in the years after 1950.

“Sowing the Seed of Hatred and Prejudice”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Residential Areas ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Political Reality

This chapter chronicles how white businessmen and workers conspired to push blacks to the margins of the economy. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and particularly in the first decade of the twentieth, white conservatives faced a political reality highly conducive to their success. Reflecting on the growth of Jim Crow in the first decade of the twentieth century, an observer declared that the objective was “to set the colored people back a hundred years in their progress.” Thus, the chapter explores issues surrounding segregation in schools, businesses, and residential areas; racial intermarriages; and other instances of preventing blacks from attaining economic and political advancement. At the same time the chapter also documents a burgeoning civil rights movement.

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
The North ◽  
The U.S

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

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