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chapter 9 The Lost Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement In the fifteen decades since the demise of Reconstruction, the two most consequential political transformations that have taken place in U.S. history are those that arose first out of the New Deal impulse of the 1930s and then, just thirty years later, the new set of laws and mores that are identified with the triumph of the civil rights movement. Indeed, one might well argue that these two moments of remarkably inventive statecraft, so often put into separate historiographical boxes, are in fact part of the same mid-twentieth-century age of social reform, in which the dialectical interplay between social movements, political reform, and judicial innovations transformed the meaning of citizenship for tens of millions of Americans. The Long Civil Rights Movement The idea that the New Deal era of governmental activism and worker empowerment laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement and its judicial and legislative consequences is today the increasingly conventional wisdom. Few historians dissent from the idea that a long civil rights movement began at some point in the Depression decade. Jacquelyn Hall codified this idea in her 2004 presidential address at the Organization of American Historians. “The Long Civil Rights Movement: Contested Past, Contingent Future” argued that a reperiodization of the civil rights movement was essential to forestall neoconservative efforts to impose a color-blind, neoliberal interpretation on the very meaning of this great social reform.1 Indeed, the idea of a long civil rights movement is not a metaphorical idea, of the sort that makes Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and Monroe Trotter progenitors of the civil rights impulse. Rather, this reperiodization requires a more concrete sense of immediate causation, in which the political and ideological transformations of the New Deal era created the conditions that led inextricably toward the mobilizations and legal/legislative victories of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 129 5/24/13 8:04 AM 130 the rights revolution This is not an entirely new historiographical idea. As early as 1968, Richard Dalfiume published an essay on World War II, “Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution,” in the Journal of American History, and a decade later Harvard Sitkoff published A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue.2 These efforts to demonstrate that something resembling a modern civil rights consciousness had entered the national political policy discourse were followed by a series of books, including those of Linda Reed, Patricia Sullivan, Timothy Tyson, Martha Biondi, Robert Korstad, and Glenda Gilmore, demonstrating that almost all of the players who would become prominent in the years after 1954 were actively engaged in a movement to transform racial mores and ideological constructs in the era of the New Deal and World War II.3 Some of these scholars, like Sullivan and Reed, emphasized the extent to which a coherent set of civil rights activists, working within well-defined organizations and campaigns, had been on the Southern scene during the years well before the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Others highlighted the role of key activists such as Ella Baker and Robert Williams, who were self-consciously radical in a fashion eschewed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s, while scholars like Martha Biondi, Robert Korstad, and Glenda Gilmore made clear the extent to which the Communist Party, or individuals working within the fellow traveling political culture of that era, played key roles in the early years of the long civil rights movement. They waged vigorous campaigns to defend victims of discrimination, organized interracial trade unions, pushed for social and sexual equality between blacks and whites and men and women, and insisted upon the rights of African Americans not only to vote but also to run for office even in the most hostile political environments. These scholars published their books during the last couple of decades, often to counter the revisionist narrative so successfully promulgated by neoconservative intellectuals who emphasized a policy discourse that left little room for governmental efforts to regulate the labor market, unorthodox foreign policy views, or trade union militancy.4 Thus, the historiographic construction of a long civil rights movement that embodied such social and political radicalism proved a boon to those liberals who sought to preserve for the progressive left, in the twenty-first century as well as in the twentieth, the ideas, ideologies, and social movements that they thought...

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