The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

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Risa Goluboff, associate professor of law at the University of Virginia, has published a new history of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. Her book, hailed by reviewers as "brilliant" and placing her "at the front rank of 20th-century American historians," shows how movement activists focused on redressing prejudice faced by agricultural and industrial workers before desegregating public secondary and elementary schools. Goluboff argues that when NAACP lawyers succeeded in Brown v. Board, they marginalized the host of other problems afflicting most African Americans. Goluboff earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and a law degree at Yale Law School, where she was senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.