There is now a vast international literature on the role of lawyers and law in social movements, on the right and the left. This literature has been enormously generative in illuminating the various ways that lawyers contribute to social struggle—by using litigation and other legal tactics to hold powerful actors to account and inspire social movement resistance—while also spotlighting how sometimes they overreach, and how their tactics and frames are frequently coopted by opponents, who use legal strategies to undermine progress. While this literature has often painted legal liberal lawyers as problematic actors, it also teaches crucial lessons about the importance of sustained legal and political resistance in the face of powerful forces. American democracy has never worked for all people. It has never lived up to its promise of equal justice. And there have been particularly dark moments, the post-Reconstruction era and the rise of Jim Crow being one of them, which have elicited courageous responses from lawyers and nonlawyers alike. As we are living through another dark and dangerous moment, it is crucial to recover stories that deepen understanding of resistance methods and give inspiration to fight back.
Professor Pamela Izvănariu provides precisely this type of analysis in her timely and important article on the unheralded Black labor activist John P. Davis and the organization that he created to fight for racial equality in New Deal labor laws: the Joint Committee for National Recovery (JCNR). Izvănariu’s work on Davis is part of a larger historical project that seeks to elevate Davis in the scholarly canon on the “pre-history” of the civil rights movement, which includes classic works by Ken Mack, Risa Goluboff, and Susan Carle, among others. Those scholars discuss the synergies and tensions between efforts to mobilize cross-racial solidarity in support of Black labor rights and the building momentum in favor of a frontal assault on school segregation culminating in what became the famous high point of civil rights lawyering: Brown v. Board of Education.
Izvănariu breaks new ground in this field. She uses archival research to show how Davis pioneered new legal advocacy strategies by using investigative tactics to unearth evidence of discriminatory intent in the design of National Recovery Act’s fair competition codes. She explores Davis’s “modes of engagement and arguments” to reveal how the act purposively discriminated against Black workers by targeting industries and geographies in a strategic effort to exempt Black labor from the protections of the New Deal. Izvănariu drills down deep into advocacy strategies, illuminating “how Davis, through his work in the organizations he founded—the Negro Industrial League and JCNR—exposed and challenged the race discrimination that shaped the National Recovery Administration codes and broader New Deal.” (P. 220.) As Izvănariu notes, this project goes beyond documentation to correct the historical record since Davis is commonly written out of history or given less credit than is due. In addition, the article recasts historical understanding of JCNR by presenting it “as a Black-led, Black-funded, and grassroots-based movement organization network dedicated to building power” (P. 221), while introducing “Davis’s multidimensional model of advocacy and identify[ing] him as a hidden but central figure in the long history of movement lawyering.” (P. 221.)
The first part of the article is devoted to establishing the origins of JCNR “as a loosely structured social movement organization” (P. 227), which was “much more than an interest group or clearinghouse.” (P. 229.) Izvănariu explains the “emergence” of JCNR, noting the importance of key factors (P. 230), including Davis’s ability to “immediately diagnose the problem, frame the situation, [and] take advantage of a fleeting opportunity bubble” to build resources and craft innovative tactics. She places emphasis on Davis’s leadership qualities (P. 231) in building connections and coalitions with diverse partners, like the YWCA, AFL, and NAACP. (P. 242) The second part canvasses the Davis-JCNR model of advocacy, which “strategically integrated deployment” of “coordinated empirical research and legal and political advocacy” (P. 245), along with “disruptive tactics and field research” to combat Jim Crow in the workplace. (P. 247)
In my view, the most fascinating piece of this investigation is Izvănariu’s discussion of Davis’s innovative use of interdisciplinary research and Black sociology to expose racial discrimination in New Deal labor laws. (P. 248) Davis drew upon novel traditions flowing from the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory and W.E.B. DuBois at Fisk University to develop mixed-method data collection that was essential to demonstrating workplace abuse among Black workers otherwise hidden from view. In Davis’s hands, “Black sociology [was] a tactic” (P. 250), used to collect data incorporated into legal briefs that combined law and statistical analyses in a precursor to the famous LDF brief demonstrating segregation’s harmful effects on children in Brown. Moreover, the “widespread dissemination of JCNR data established the organization and its leadership as reliable and expert sources of information” (P. 259), which it leveraged in administrative advocacy to eliminate discrimination in codes, pass new laws, promote enforcement. (P. 260.) This discussion provides new evidence of the importance of sociological research to Black legal mobilization in the pre-Brown period, adding important new details to the advent of Black legal realism documented by Ken Mack.
In terms of legal mobilization, the final part of the article puts to rest any doubts that the type of multidimensional advocacy associated with contemporary movement lawyering had origins well before the civil rights movement—with Davis offering a pioneering example. (P. 273) Once again, Izvănariu shows the value of her investigation into JCNR’s coordinated approach to organizing and legal mobilization. (P. 274.) She brings this coordination to life in her study of the Maid-Well case, which vividly reveals the incredible story of Davis’s commitment, courage, ingenuity, and advocacy. Davis collected data on discrimination against Black women garment workers and persuasively debunked employer claims by showing that their lower productivity relative to white workers was the result of poor conditions. When the employer would not budge, Davis took to the media, writing an article in The Crisis magazine based on empirical research from surveys, letters, and ethnographic study. (P. 283.) He succeeded in generating enough attention to prosecute the case against the recalcitrant owner, winning several thousand dollars for the workers, despite forum switching and death threats, before the Supreme Court invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act, nullifying the case. Nonetheless, Izvănariu shows how there is success in this apparent failure, sending a powerful symbolic message that a Black-led grassroots group could “win justice for Negro workers.” (P. 290.) I thought this was a strong and fitting conclusion and appreciated Izvănariu’s commitment to letting the history speak for itself, although I was curious about how this conclusion ties to larger debates over the efficacy of law as a tool of social change and how the type of multidimensional advocacy Davis pioneered has continued relevance in our current political environment, with increasing echoes of the era she depicts.
Izvănariu has produced an enormously important piece of historical scholarship on a previously underappreciate sector of the Black bar, which rigorously demonstrates how Davis contributed to the struggle against segregation and the rise of movement lawyering. It is carefully researched, elegantly written, and contains important payoffs for historians and scholars of contemporary social movements alike. Most importantly, it teaches us that the struggle for equal justice is an unfinished project that each generation must do its part to sustain, walking along paths forged by earlier lawyers who held fast to the belief that the rule of law mattered even as they fought to make law better.
