wall charts
the lost promise of civil rights
p listen to a short interview with risa goluboff host chris gondek producer heron & crane p in this groundbreaking book risa l. goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of american civil rights law . the supreme courts decision in brown v. board of education 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 brown 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 brown however they had eliminated workers economic concerns from their litigation agenda . when the lawyers succeeded in brown 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 brown only partially fulfilled the promise of civil rights .