Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931-1941

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

“…My research looks at a much earlier period (1880–1915) and from this location I completely agree with Mack on the central thesis of his article (once I put aside my possible quibble about early civil rights lawyers' stance toward courts). More specifically, I agree with Mack's key points that the professional project of the early civil rights bar was (1) closely aligned with concepts of economic citizenship and (2) connected to ideas that the long‐term future of the civil rights movement lay in cross‐racial, class‐based economic alliances with whites (Mack 2006, 265). Both are points that tend to be disregarded by sanitizing legal liberal scholars who worry about tainting memories of the civil rights activism with a left‐wing focus on economic justice (but see Gilmore 1996).…”

“…Mack especially emphasizes this broader economic justice‐seeking aspect of some interwar civil rights lawyers' economic radicalism in his shorter companion article published in The Journal of American History (Mack 2006). In both this and his Yale Law Journal article, Mack is focused on the ideologies and concomitant collective action strategies that motivated civil rights lawyers of the interwar generation.…”

“…In her classic biography of Charles Hamilton Houston, Genna Rae McNeil highlighted the term “social engineer” in relation to Houston's litigation work; her work pioneered pathways for analyzing civil rights lawyer activism that others later followed (McNeil ). I agree with McNeil, and thus must disagree with Mack, when he says that as initially formulated Houston's concept of social engineering “did not encompass attempts to transform American society through litigation” (Mack , 299; see also 271, 281, 284). Mack is right to argue that Houston's conception of social engineering encompassed far more than litigation, but Houston did care about preparing his students potentially to become civil rights litigators from quite an early stage in his thinking (Carle , 295–96).…”

“…He did so in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R.R. Co . (1944), which announced the doctrine of labor unions' duty of fair representation (Mack , 394 n35). That precedent lay fallow for years, until, as Sophia Lee shows in her important work on the NAACP's continuing commitment to labor and economic justice issues in the 1950s and after, it took up the project of pushing the National Labor Relations Board to give teeth to these antidiscrimination principles (Lee ).…”

Legal History and the Problem of the Long Civil Rights Movement

“…Tomiko Brown-Nagin (2011) has identified an underappreciated “pragmatic” strand of civil rights activism in her legal history of Atlanta's black freedom struggle from the 1940s to the 1970s. Kenneth Mack (2005,2006,2012) has offered a revisionist account of civil rights lawyering in the decades before Brown . A central theme of these works is the need to adopt a broader definition of civil rights, one that reaches beyond Brown v. Board of Education and the landmark congressional breakthroughs of the 1960s.…”