and reinforced the NAACP's eschewal of working-class African Americans' concerns. Brown also led to today's civil rights, which have "separated economics from race and justified judicial interference with the latter but not the former" (264). Goluboff's impressive book is required reading for legal, political, civil rights, and labor historians. While scholars have recognized the labor-focused civil rights activism of the 1930s and 1940s, Goluboff is the first to recover its legal counterpart, wherein civil rights attorneys sought to ensure substantive economic security for all workers, not only formal equality for African Americans. She also helps complicate Brown-centered civil rights legal histories, inserting contingency into the rise of modern equal protection. Furthermore, Goluboff challenges recent postwar histories that have emphasized legal liberals' misplaced faith in courts as vehicles for change, suggesting legal decisions had the power to foster, or thwart, Jim Crow's demise. But Goluboff may prematurely eulogize civil rights' promise, both overestimating the potential of the abandoned Thirteenth Amendment approach and underestimating the economic goals of post-Brown equal protection. For decades after Brown, equal protection offered hope of economic security as attorneys stretched state action to reach ostensibly private discrimination by employers and unions. And while Goluboff details the limits of equal protection, she does not similarly examine Thirteenth Amendment claims. Which of Jim Crow's many facets might they have ultimately failed to reach? Many of equal protection's limits resulted from backlash litigants bending doctrine to their own ends. If successful, in what ways might Thirteenth Amendment doctrine have been likewise transformed? Goluboff convincingly demonstrates that Brown has warped civil rights legal histories, which have read a road to that decision onto a much richer, variable, and contested past. As such, it is a triumph. In what sense civil rights' economic promise has been lost is less clear: did it cease after Brown or has it merely fallen from view? That Goluboff's rich book provokes such weighty questions is a testament to its significance.
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