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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Published in | The Yale law journal Vol. 115; no. 2; pp. 256 - 354 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
New Haven
The Yale Law Journal Company
01.11.2005
Yale University, School of Law Yale Law Journal Company, Inc |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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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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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0044-0094 1939-8611 |