Making Legal History: Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson

6. The Long, Broad, and Deep Civil Rights Movement: The Lessons of a Master Scholar and Teacher

140 > 141 radicals and welfare-rights activists, as well as struggles over housing, schools, employment, and war and peace. With these local change agents as centers of attention—rather than elite decision makers at the Court and at the national level, alone—we gain a greater sense of the movement ’s depth and breadth and thus a different, and perhaps more hopeful, view of the possibilities for social change in a participatory democracy.2 This effort to foreground local change agents reflects a scholarly journey that owes much to the sponsorship of William E. Nelson and the Samuel I. Golieb fellowship at New York University School of Law. Nelson taught me the craft of legal history. He urged me to take great care to follow my sources—all of them—and to avoid presentism. Nelson ’s intellectual guidance inspired me to appreciate more fully and to defend my methodological innovations and commitments. His teachings brought great scholarly rewards. The cast of characters whose lives I ultimately recovered in Courage to Dissent highlight important political , economic, and cultural dimensions of twentieth-century struggles for racial equality. These strands of movement history often are lost in triumphant, national, NAACP- and court-centered narratives about the civil rights movement. The balance of this essay explores the story of the evolution of my work on these subjects under Nelson’s guidance. The Initial Puzzle: Too Many Sources, Methodologies, and Interpretative Approaches The coming together of my intellectual journey, Nelson’s guidance, and my present book project began in New Haven. I came to New York University and Bill Nelson from Yale Law School, where I had become acquainted with the achievements of the Warren Court and a point of view on the law now associated with “legal liberalism.”3 The Warren Court had put into effect a “program of constitutional reform almost revolutionary in its aspirations, and now and then, in its achievement,”4 in the words of one eloquent proponent of this school of thought.5 On this account, the federal courts had been and could ever be protectors of the disadvantaged, as impartial judges set aside politics and pursued the “true” meaning of such constitutional values as equal protection.6 This attractive and hopeful picture of the federal courts, the Justices, and the Court’s role in social change envisioned law as a noble profession. 142 > 143 institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court or Congress, as points of departure. In the view of scholars working in the bottom-up school of thought, studies from that top-down perspective erased “any sense of the complexity of the African-American community and how that complexity shaped responses to oppression.” To portray more clearly those historical actors stressed by the bottom-up, community-based perspective, historians adopting that viewpoint even deemphasized the contributions of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers who had received so much attention in initial historical appraisals of the civil rights movement. These historians invoked and guided their work by an adage associated with the student movement: “Let the people speak. Let the people decide.”12 The community-study methodology in particular and the concept of bottom-up history more generally held tremendous appeal. Existing narratives about the struggle for civil rights, instructive as they were about the courts and their important roles in processes of historical change, told “partial truths.”13 The court-centered texts elided important social and political contexts in the communities affected by the courts and the civil rights lawyers who deemed themselves representatives of the people. Ironically, this elision occurred not out of spite for African Americans at the local level14 but because of admiration for the Warren Court and Thurgood Marshall. * * * Nevertheless, the question of how to integrate bottom-up and top-down in proper proportions within the context of civil rights legal history struck me as difficult,15 for the top-down, court-centric, and bottom-up, localist methodologies—as I hoped to execute them—did not seem that complementary, at least at first. To be sure, legal historians before me had considered law in context. However, for the scholar interested in how external forces shaped the law, the relevant context tended to be political history, and sometimes economic history.16 The political actors in question tended to be elites: presidents, or members of Congress and state legislatures who write the laws that become the subject of litigation. In...