Goluboff Authors Book on “Lost Promise” of Civil Rights Goluboff
turned her award-winning Ph.D. thesis from Princeton into a book
on an unexplored facet of civil rights history. Before Brown v.
Board of Education, the early civil rights movement explored
avenues to create equality for African-Americans that have
mostly been abandoned today, argues Virginia law professor Risa
Goluboff in her groundbreaking new book on the history of civil
rights law. “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights” explores the
fight for black economic and labor rights beginning with the
1930s until the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing “separate
but equal” schools set the stage for looking at race through the
lens of integration in education. The result of abandoning this
path to civil rights, Goluboff claims, is an inability to
resolve the troubling legacy of racial economic inequality that
remains today. “Before Brown, civil rights looked a lot
different than they do today,” Goluboff said. “Brown isn’t only
the end of segregation, it