"We live's in a free house such as it is": class and the creation of modern civil rights.

INTRODUCTION

The shift during the 1940s from American public concern with class to concern with race has become a commonplace in American historiography. Alan Brinkley has written that World War II

  was a significant moment in the shift of American liberalism from a 
   preoccupation with "reform" (with a set of essentially class-based 
   issues centered around confronting the problem of monopoly and 
   economic disorder) and toward a preoccupation with "rights" (a 
   commitment to the liberties and entitlements of individuals and thus 
   to the liberation of oppressed people and groups). (1) 

Gary Gerstle has come to a similar conclusion, observing a "seismic" shift in which liberals "committed [themselves] to civil rights ... [and] concerns with class division and the ill effects of capitalist civilization ... lost their primacy" on "the liberal agenda." (2) Brinkley and Gerstle seem to assume at least a historical and perhaps even a natural correlation between government regulation and class on the one hand, and between individual rights claims and race on the other. Even as they acknowledge that class issues "did not disappear from the liberal agenda," (3) they nonetheless describe them as separate from, and contrasted with, the modern thing called "civil rights" that was created in the 1940s. (4)

But there is neither a natural correlation between race and rights nor a historical one. While I agree with Brinkley and Gerstle that racial concerns became more prominent in the 1940s than they had been before, I do not agree that the concept of "civil rights" encompassed race to the exclusion of class. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, there was no settled category called civil rights in the 1940s; rather, there were many lay people, lawyers, and institutions searching for "rights" to formulate and constitutionalize." (5) The federal government, for example, was struggling to find a place in rights creation and enforcement. (6) And the NAACP's new Legal Defense and Education Fund (Inc. Fund) (7) was only beginning to contemplate the attack on Plessy v. Ferguson (8) that would eventually lead to Brown v. Board of Education. (9) Frameworks, strategies, and outcomes remained uncertain.

The individual rights assertions one finds trapped in the NAACP's voluminous archives--particularly in the labor-related claims of southern agricultural workers--show how varied conceptions of civil rights were during the 1940s. More specifically, they show voices actively pushing the Inc. Fund toward economics and class issues. During this decade of confusion and experimentation, then, the assertion of African American rights did not always take the now familiar form of equal-protection-based antidiscrimination claims divorced from class. What did take that form were the rights claims that the most vocal and successful black lawyers--those in the Inc. Fund--chose to validate, pursue, and make doctrinally foundational. The NAACP lawyers marginalized, cabined, and outright repudiated class issues through the complaints they pursued and those they ignored. By the 1950s, when the antisegregation strategy that eventually led to Brown coalesced, they had succeeded in writing class out of their story.

They succeeded in writing it out of our story as well. The correlation between the Inc. Fund's economically neutralized agenda and a historiography that sees rights in the 1940s as noneconomic is no coincidence. Historians are wrong about the essential nature of individual rights because they have ignored the class-bound aspects of many rights claims of the period. They have ignored these claims because they have largely taken their history and their understanding about civil rights from the NAACP's understanding and agenda. Equating the kinds of rights the Inc. Fund sought to protect with the complete set of rights African Americans sought to assert has thus led historians astray. (10) Whether individual rights in the 1940s can accurately be said to include class as well as race concerns depends in large part on whose rights one examines.