Past Using James Baldwin and Civil Rights Law in the 1960s

This essay charts the intersecting relations between social and historical accounts of the nature of American racial inequality in Baldwin's essays and in the broader discourse of American civil rights in the 1960s. It maintains that the history of racial inequality achieves a new political salience over the course of the 1960s, that it achieves this salience because it serves as a proxy for those features of racial disadvantage deriving from something other than the state's authority, and that its rise mirrors the rise of a widespread anxiety that legal initiatives might be unable to eliminate American racial inequality.