Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics in the Era before "Brown"

This Article argues that scholarly accounts of civil rights lawyering and politics have emphasized, incorrectly, a narrative that begins with Plessy v. Ferguson and ends with "Brown" v. Board of Education. That traditional narrative has relied on a legal liberal view of civil rights politi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Yale law journal Vol. 115; no. 2; pp. 256 - 354
Main Author Mack, Kenneth W.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New Haven The Yale Law Journal Company 01.11.2005
Yale University, School of Law
Yale Law Journal Company, Inc
Subjects
20th century
African American culture
African Americans
Attorneys
Civil law
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Community
Constitutional law
Desegregation
Historical analysis
History
History of law
Interpretation and construction
Interwar years
Law schools
Laws, regulations and rules
Lawyer client communication
Lawyers
Liberalism
Litigation
Politics
Public law
Public opinion
Racial inequality
Segregation
Social change
Studies
Supreme Court decisions
United States > US
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Summary:This Article argues that scholarly accounts of civil rights lawyering and politics have emphasized, incorrectly, a narrative that begins with Plessy v. Ferguson and ends with "Brown" v. Board of Education. That traditional narrative has relied on a legal liberal view of civil rights politics-a view that focuses on court-based and rights-centered public law litigation. That narrative has, in turn, generated a revisionist literature that has critiqued legal liberal politics. This Article contends that both the traditional and revisionist works have focused on strains of civil rights politics that appear to anticipate "Brown", and thus have suppressed alternative visions of that politics. This Article attempts to recover these alternatives by analyzing the history of civil rights lawyering between the First and Second World Wars. It recovers debates concerning intraracial African-American identity and anti-segregation work, lawyers' work and social change, rights-based advocacy and legal realism, and the legal construction of racial and economic inequality that have been elided in the existing literature. It thus contends that the scholarly inquiries that have been generated in both the traditional and the revisionist work should be reframed.
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ISSN:0044-0094
1939-8611