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The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

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Prof. Goluboff wishes that the civil rights movement had been one prong of the effort to radically reshape the Constitution to support radical economic goals. Behind her historical analysis lies the Marxist idea that Jim Crow laws were essentially no more than a racist sub-category of the capitalist exploitation of workers. Prof. Goluboff would have liked the civil rights lawyers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s to demand affirmative constitutional economic rights - i.e., universal entitlements to housing, salary, and other tangible goods. And she believes that such "rights" stood a chance of being recognized, even though the whole country in the 40s and 50s was growing less sympathetic to the more radical parts of the labor movement of the 20s and 30s.

In fact, Prof. Goluboff's viewpoint is similar to that of Pres. Obama, as he expressed it in 2001 in a radio interview:

"...the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties."

Whatever the depth of Prof. Goluboff's research, she has used it to support a simplistic idea of the economic system, and to promote an unjustified distortion of the Constitution. There is nothing in the Constitution to support what she longs for, but, because she longs for it, she has found a way to make the Constitution require it. She aims at nothing less than the elimination of the Constitution as a constitution, to make its words infinitely malleable - to "break free from the essential constraints," as Pres. Obama candidly put it. But those "essential constraints" are indeed essential - as a bulwark against tyranny and a guarantee of liberty. Once the constraints are lifted, what is to prevent the abuse of power? Power once given is very difficult to take back, and the stated good intentions of the rulers never stop them ultimately from doing whatever they decide is necessary.

Moreover, what Prof. Goluboff and her numerous, like-minded academic comrades fail to understand is that the cause of racial justice stands on its own. It is not exclusively the property of any political group, and it certainly has no place as a mere prop in a leftist morality play. It is, in fact, the cause of the entire nation, and has been from the start. As Frederick Douglass said, "The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution."

The professor would do well to consider the chapters in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" in which the protagonist joins a communist organization. The Brotherhood, as it is called, is only too ready to let him serve as a public face to the group. He soon discovers, however, that, in the eyes of the leadership, he is nothing more than a tool, a means to an end in their quest to gain power for themselves. Such would have been the fate of the members of the civil rights movement had it been subsumed, as Prof. Goluboff wishes had happened, within a movement of economic radicalism.

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