Bringing the Law Back into the History of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

It is a pleasure to comment on Nancy MacLean's hugely important book Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace as an example of what I might call “bringing the law back in” to the history of the civil rights movement. A generation ago, the idea that law needed to be introduced into this history would have seemed nonsensical. At that time, law provided one of the central touchstones in the historical narrative of the struggle for racial equality in American life. Scholarship in this area built on C. Vann Woodward's pioneering work on the rise of Jim Crow, which itself was written shortly after Woodward's participation in the Brown v. Board of Education litigation. The dominant narrative began with the legal construction of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century and continued with the founding of the NAACP. Other actors came along at various points in the story, prominent among them New Deal–era racial liberals, World War II–era activists, midcentury social scientists, Southern civil rights leaders and movements, and eventually black power. The end point was marked by the litigation and legislative victories of the 1950s and '60s, which finally wrote back into law what had been taken away by segregationist white Southerners and a compliant Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century. The implicit methodological take on law was that state and federal statutes, as well as court decisions, provided an important impetus, or at the very least a validation, for racial change—first for white Southerners as they created the Jim Crow legal regime and later for segregation's opponents as they reinscribed racial equality onto the core narrative of American life.

Entre La Ley Y La Realidad: Desafíos en La Justiciabilidad De Los Desca

“…Por su parte, las organizaciones de la sociedad civil que podrían impulsar procesos estratégicos de exigibilidad y litigio de alto impacto enfrentan severas limitaciones presupuestarias y organizativas para desarrollar una adecuada estrategia en este sentido (Mack, 2012). Esta situación se ve agravada por la falta de recursos, capacidades instaladas y sustento legal que limita la posibilidad de litigar sistemáticamente por los DESCA a nivel nacional e internacional con el fin de sentar jurisprudencia sobre la materia (Paffenholz, 2010).…”

Conceptions of Agency in Social Movement Scholarship: Mack on African American Civil Rights Lawyers

“…In the period after the publication of the two articles just discussed, Mack 2009 takes a break from the very long, in‐depth scholarship of “Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering.” His writing comments on Obama's election to the presidency (2009), favorably reviews other scholars' books (2012), and offers a short exploration of the everyday professional performance of civil rights lawyer Justin Carter of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (2008). In this article, too, Mack 2012 hones in on the individual performance aspect of elite African American lawyers' professional work.…”

Enforcing Desegregation: A Case Study of Federal District Court Power and Social Change in Macon County Alabama

“…Alabama Governor George Wallace's interference with the ensuing federal court order transformed it into the vehicle for achieving statewide school desegregation. This district court case concretizes the impact of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and shows how the lower court advanced social change (Mack 2012: 1040, reviewing Brown-Nagin 2011. The case also illuminates the role of the federal government in school desegregation.…”