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

Abstract

By contrast, many scholars who focus on the Northern civil rights movement, which operated in a region without explicit legal segregation, have explicitly grappled with law as a site of organization and as a means of structuring the choices made by movement actors and their opponents. Thomas J.

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 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 hones in on the individual performance aspect of elite African American lawyers' professional work.…”