Susan D. Carle - Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915

SUSAN D. CARLE

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First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2015.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carle, Susan D.

Defining the struggle : national organizing for racial justice, 18801915 / by Susan D. Carle.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780199945740 (hardback : alk. paper); 978019023524-6 (paperback : alk. paper); eISBN ISBN 9780190850609

1. African AmericansLegal status, laws, etc.History. 2. Civil rights movementsUnited States.History. 3. Civil rights lawyersUnited States.History. I. Title.

KF4757.C37 2013

323.1196'073009034dc23

2013020647

For Henry S. Friedman

A multidisciplinary perspective frames my inquiry here. As a law professor who focuses on the development of American conceptions of public interest lawyering, I am highly influenced by contemporary trends in legal scholarship, especially the many outstanding works on the legal history of the civil rights movement cited throughout the book.

I draw on social movement theory when it is applicable as well. I take to heart historians caution that the social movement label should not be slapped on to all instances of social change activism, lest that term lose its specific meaning in referring to relatively short-lived, mass social phenomena. What I have found most helpful in social movement theory are its insights about organizations that seek to bring about social change through methods other than business-as-usual politics. I especially share the theoretical commitments of some social movement scholars to a form of analysis sometimes referred to as interactionism (or symbolic interactionism), which seeks to interpret social phenomena by studying the cultural meaning produced through interactions among social, political, legal, and historical conditions, individual personalities, and collective action initiatives. This is a theme to which I repeatedly return in this project: Even in the face of social and political conditions including lynching, political disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, and massive structural subordination in employment, education, housing and health, the organizations and leaders I examine here found ways to exercise agency to oppose racial injustice.