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Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931–1941
Kenneth W. Mack
| In August 1931 the most famous lawyers in black and white America, respectively, gathered for two days of discussion about the relationship between law, social change, and African American citizenship. The debate took place at the annual convention of the National Bar Association (NBA)—the black lawyers' professional group—where the famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow headlined a group of speakers who were, or would become, central figures in the nation's civil rights and civil liberties politics. Joining Darrow on the program were James A. Cobb, the first African American lawyer to enter the upper echelon of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attorneys; Joseph Brodsky, the chief lawyer for the leftist International Labor Defense (ILD); as well as C. Francis Stradford and Charles H. Houston, both of whom would do important work for the NAACP. The subject of the debate was the possibility of gaining full citizenship rights for African Americans through legal strategies, and the range of positions on the subject among the speakers led to contention. When the bar association considered a resolution endorsing the civil rights efforts of the ILD, emotions ran so high that the president of the association, Raymond Pace Alexander, could barely control the debate. At first, speeches were limited to five minutes, then three, then one, until finally each speaker had only ten seconds to make a point. At the close of the meeting, the association passed a resolution barring future speakers from addressing the convention if they were not "in sympathy with the objects and purposes of the Association."1 |
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What brought such fierce debate to the usually staid gathering were the beginnings of a dispute that would play out over the next decade in civil rights circles, over the roles of law and of mass politics in the movement. During the 1910s and 1920s, the NAACP had scored some striking successes in its litigation and lobbying, winning important Supreme Court cases and getting antilynching legislation passed by the House of Representatives. By the start of the depression decade, however, some were arguing that such law-centered activities should be replaced or supplemented by direct-action and mass-based economic and political activity, and in 1931 the principal source of that critique was the Communist party–affiliated ILD. Participants often described the depression-era debate as one between advocates of "legalism" and of mass politics—a debate that the legalists apparently won when, in the late 1930s, Houston and his colleagues at the black bar took charge of an NAACP litigation program that scored its most famous victory in Brown v. Board of Education.2 |
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Echoes of this framing of the debate have found their way into scholarly histories of the civil rights movement. Many scholars have argued that the movement's turn to law, encapsulated in the NAACP litigation campaign against segregation, represented a turn away from direct action, democratic mass-movement politics, and economic populism. Indeed, recent debates on the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision have often incorporated this assumption.3 It has also become an article of faith that the civil rights and labor movements were both channeled into what one influential article termed a "legal-administrative, if not a bureaucratic, approach to winning citizenship rights."4 A wider-ranging literature has argued that populist social movements turned to the state sometime between the New Deal and the climax of the Great Society and that, partly as a consequence, they adopted a politics of race and rights rather than one of class and populism.5 Attitudes toward law and lawyers have varied in the literature, but recent work has often emphasized the conservative power of law—its ability to constrain the politics of social movements by steering their claims into narrow legalism.6 |
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