Abstract:

This dissertation is a social and cultural history of civil rights lawyering between the years 1920 and 1940. Its subject matter is the changing contours of professional identity for the leaders of the civil rights bar during this period, and the accompanying transformations in these lawyers' conceptions of civil rights politics and African American citizenship. It focuses on a particularly important group of African American lawyers who entered practice after World War I in Northern and border state cities, and who would become the leaders of the local and national civil rights bar during the 1930s. In particular, it centers on the professional lives of Raymond Pace Alexander and Sadie T.M. Alexander of Philadelphia, Charles H. Houston of Washington, D.C., and William H. Hastie of Washington, D.C., with lesser attention devoted to lawyers such as Loren Miller of Los Angeles, Fitzhugh Lee Styles of Philadelphia, C. Francis Stradford of Chicago, Leon A. Ransom of Washington, D.C. and Earl Dickerson of Chicago. It also charts the debates and professional agenda of the National Bar Association---the black lawyers' professional group---during this period.

I argue that the history of civil rights lawyering is best captured by historicizing professional identity itself, and that the professional identities of these lawyers moved through several transformations during this period, beginning with race uplift during the 1920s and ending with a popular front alliance of civil rights, civil liberties, labor, and left activists that had come to the fore by 1940. Each of these transformations had its roots in the professional challenges these lawyers faced in the everyday practice of law, the ideological force of legal doctrine and legal institutions, the cultural life of the African American middle class, and the political implications of the rise of New Deal and popular front politics. After the 1940s, the complex history of civil rights lawyering in this period would be replaced by a narrative of liberal politics that, ironically, would be constructed with the aid of the civil rights lawyers themselves.