From Labor Sit-Downs to Civil Rights Sit-Ins

A Genealogy of Liberal Civil Disobedience

Bibliographic Data

ID6399435
AuthorsWilliam E Scheuerman (0000-0001-8054-6481, Indiana University Bloomington, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume86
Issue3
Pages355-379
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Review of Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0034670524000032
OpenAlexW4392817261
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

Liberal views of civil disobedience that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s can only be properly interpreted with recourse to the complicated history of the early civil rights movement's selective appropriation of the labor sit-downs of the 1930s. This essay addresses the messy but basically successful effort by civil rights sit-inners and the lawyers who defended them to circumvent the repressive state and legal response—especially the US Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation (1939)—that the 1930s sit-downers garnered. My reexamination of the sit-ins places influential liberal ideas about civil disobedience in a fresh light. In his influential theory of civil disobedience, John Rawls mirrored key features of the politically and legally savvy strategy of delinking the lunch counter sit-ins from the workplace sit-downs. The result was a somewhat restrictive view of civil disobedience that sidelined matters of economic justice

Civil disobedience · Civil rights · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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