Civil Rights in America: A History by Christopher W. Schmidt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civil Rights in America: A History by Christopher W. Schmidt Adam Lee Cilli Civil Rights in America: A History. By Christopher W. Schmidt. Cambridge Studies on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 215. Paper, $34.99, ISBN 978-1-108-44497-2; cloth, $99.99, ISBN 978-1-108-42625-1.) Christopher W. Schmidt's Civil Rights in America: A History manages at once to be analytically rigorous and highly accessible. Without getting bogged down in technical legal jargon, he tells a big story about a two-word phrase, civil rights, that has been at the center of some of the most transformative episodes in American political history since 1865. Schmidt shows how policy makers and activists from the Reconstruction era to the present have built on preexisting meanings associated with civil rights while fighting to expand its scope. "The power of the civil rights label is that it has been a relatively open concept," the author writes, "with a meaning that evolves as different groups convince their fellow Americans that their rights claims also belong under its protective umbrella" (p. 136). In the aftermath of the Civil War, as the legal status of four million former slaves remained unclear, the definition of civil rights became the central focus of a national debate over what constituted citizenship. Black leaders and their white allies fought for a more expansive vision of civil rights, one that went beyond property rights and access to courts to include federal safeguards against race-based discrimination. Schmidt adroitly probes congressional records, letters and petitions from freedpeople, newspaper editorials, and speech transcripts to reconstruct the debates that took place in and outside halls of governance and to track the expansion of civil rights from the 1866 Civil Rights Act to transformative constitutional amendments. [End Page 424] Debates over the nature of civil rights gradually subsided after Reconstruction, and during the ensuing Jim Crow era, civil rights were rarely featured as an object of national public discourse. Beginning in the late 1940s, however, the term once again assumed countrywide significance. For reasons of "principle, politics, and international strategy," Cold War liberals focused renewed federal attention on racial injustice in America and harnessed the civil rights label to describe and advance "the most ambitious collection of antidiscrimination reforms" since Reconstruction (p. 54). Sensing this shift in the political wind, Black and white activists invoked civil rights to espouse a far-reaching set of social goals, and they leveraged its "universalist frame" to build a broad-based interracial coalition (p. 54). This era thus witnessed the emergence of new descriptors such as civil rights lawyers, civil rights organizations, and a civil rights movement, and it culminated with the passages of the civil rights and voting rights laws of 1964 and 1965. Opposition to civil rights, as a set of fundamental rights and as a label, is a part of this story as well. Often this came from conservatives desiring to restrict its meaning or roll back its gains. Yet sometimes it included left-wing activists committed to building a more just and racially egalitarian society. Indeed, some of the very proponents of civil rights reform also expressed discomfort with its limits, with the host of issues it excluded. Thus, for Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, and in his later years, Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights became "a convenient foil" against which they could espouse more radical programs (p. 77). This points to a central element of Schmidt's analysis. He argues that one of the strengths of civil rights as a term of political discourse is its limiting feature—that it has always involved a historically contingent process of negotiation and compromise over what is a civil right and what is not. Through these debates, "a functional consensus [has often] emerged around the core meaning" of civil rights that has "provided a foundation for claims of radical change in American racial politics while at the same time serving as a constraint on this change" (pp. 12, 13). Without such boundaries, the phrase loses much of its political and discursive power. It slips into ambiguity—alongside social justice, equality, and freedom—and...