The Thirteenth Amendment and the lost origins of civil rights.(US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division) From: Duke Law Journal | Date: April 1, 2001| Author: Goluboff, Risa L. | COPYRIGHT 2001 Duke University, School of Law. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

ABSTRACT

For the fifteen years prior to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, "civil rights" did not refer to a unified, coherent category. Rather, the content of the term was open, changing, and contradictory. The lawyers of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, which was created in 1939, were among those thinking about, and experimenting with, different ways of practicing and framing civil rights in the 1940s. Their practice...