Farewell. What's New?

I'd be remiss if I didn't bid farewell to Selma, Alabama's Sheriff Jim Clark. He was the Movement's perfect foil, embodying for a national audience the brutal malice of Southern white racism. George Wallace and others eventually claimed to repent. To his dying day, Jim Clark claimed he had nothing to repent of. Final judgment isn't mine to pronounce, but in more ways than one I'm glad not to be in Jim's shoes as he meets his final reckoning.

Two new books in civil rights historiography caught my eye yesterday. The first is Robert J. Cooke's Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965.

Robert J. Cook recounts the planning, organization, and ultimate failure of this controversial event and reveals how the broadbased public history extravaganza was derailed by its appearance during the decisive phase of the civil rights movement.

The other and, perhaps, more important is Risa L. Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights.

When the lawyers succeeded in Brown, they simultaneously marginalized the host of other harms -- economic inequality chief among them -- that afflicted the majority of African Americans during the mid-twentieth century. By uncovering the lost challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the promise of civil rights.

There's an excerpt from Goluboff's book in the Virginia Law Review. I haven't seen them yet, but -- just on the face of things – they strike me as the kind of work that we're seeing in a third generation of writing about the civil rights era.

The first generation, before 1980, was dominated by the production of essentially primary sources and fairly simple narratives. After 1980, critical scholarship really entered the field, led by David Garrow's and Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize winning work, the King Papers Project, and remarkable biographies and state and local studies. These two new books, it seems to me, bear the hallmarks of a third generation of scholarship, well aware of but less preoccupied with either Brown or King than earlier work. They explore new and unexpected subjects, illuminating the era in ways we hadn't anticipated. Hattip.