NAACP And Post Cold War Constitutionalism, New Light In A New Book

I know it is just an example but it can really show you the power of governmental agencies in creating important social changes.

The release of Sophia Z. Lee “Hotspots in a Cold War: The NAACP’s Postwar Workplace Constitutionalism, 1948-1964″ can teach us a thing or two about the history of NAACP:

Throughout the Cold War 1950s, the NAACP sustained an ambitious campaign for African-American workers’ constitutional right to join unions and access decent jobs. Surprisingly, it did so not in the courts, but in executive branch agencies and committees. Blending law and politics, the NAACP worked closely with labor leaders, varying its campaign according to the racial practices of unions and employers. In 1964, in one of the era’s most expansive state-action rulings, the NAACP won its workplace constitutional claims-not in the Supreme Court, but in front of a classic New Deal agency: the National Labor Relations Board. Historians generally depict the NAACP as taking a conservative Cold War turn, forsaking challenges to workplace discrimination and to the state-action doctrine. The NAACP’s employment litigation is then described as being reborn in the 1960s amid the burgeoning of black protest politics.

Not the supreme court but rather the National Labor Relations Board was the key to the post cold war changes in the work place policies towards the African American community.

I found the abstract to this new book in the Feminist Law Professors blog and it sounds a a good read into the history of our nation and the NAACP’s history.