thanking. ulysses was published between march of 1819 and december, 1920, and an american periodical called the little review coming and we have copies of all of those as well. the reason i brought these today is not so much to show you the first edition of ulysses but a leader in addition that is extremely rare. in 1921 the american government declared ulysses obscene and pornographic. and the book was banned. people still wanted to read it, however, and we actually have a copy of one of the additions and if you notice the spines

alice-in-wonderland and the little minister putative university of virginia professor stephen talked about civil rights. this is just over ten minutes. >> the lost promise of civil rights is published by harvard university press and the author is professor risa goluboff of the university of virginia. professor golubuff, what is the civil rights action? and a unit of the federal government of the united states government created in 1939, just before world war ii, and when it was clear that it was a part of the department of justice and when it was created, it was thought to be -- its charge to

protect individual rights, fundamental individual rights. people were not exactly sure what that meant and what the first thought that event is the rights of workers trying to collectively bargain and organizing to the unions but when world war ii started, race became much more prominent in the political scene and the civil rights section started to think about how to protect the african-americans. as a result they started to think about how to protect the rights of african american workers, so the civil rights section during the 1940's takes a whole bunch of cases in which the rights of the workers are at stake and prosecute all kinds of employers for violations of the civil rights law. >> was it formed by an executive order or legislation? >> formed by a executive order, formed by franklin roosevelt, and at the request of frank murphy, the terrie nei general -- attorney general, he was from

michigan, she was a very big supporter of the labor unions, and he was also -- he goes on to become attorney general of supreme court justice, sees a big component of individual rights as well. >> what kind of plus degette when it was formed? was it controversy? >> there wasn't much controversy about it. it didn't get that much cost. was small. about seven people. in fact a lot of what it does over the course of world war ii i think it can do because it is small and falls below the radar screen. >> does it still exist? >> it became the civil rights division of the department of justice in 1957, so it becomes its own division and a gradually gets much bigger especially after the civil rights act of 1965 voting rights act, its enforcement powers and its capacity in the number of lawyers and status collis in a way yes.

>> how does the civil rights action type into the title of your book the lost promise of civil rights? >> it's crucial to my book. the book is about civil rights before board of education. >> 1954. >> 1954, yes. so it's basically about civil rights between the new deal in the 1930's and brown v. board of education in 1954. and the idea is to try to think about what civil rights looked like before brown. brown tells us one version of civil rights that jim crow was a system of state mandated segregation, and in brown v. board of education the supreme court tells us that is not constitutional and we move from there to the new era of civil rights, and this book asks what does the civil rights look like before brown before we had that idea of jim crow? it does so by looking at what they were asking lawyers to do for them, what they thought jim-crow did to them and how it harmed them and their understanding of what it was was a lot broader than the image

that comes out of brown v. board of education. the image was it's not only adel law saying that that's why children go to different schools. it's not only signs over water fountains. it's not only the law. it is also employers who only hire whites, industries that only hire whites or hire african-americans for the worst paid most dangerous worst condition jobs. is the federal government and the state government interfering in the economy in the racially discriminatory ways. is it, the image that comes out of the cases in the civil rights section takes on behalf of african-american workers reveal jim-crow that is much more total, much more economic, much more about deprivation and exploitation as well as about stigma is the symbolism and state mandated law. summit during that time period,

risa goluboff, what were some of the successes of the civil rights section? >> the big success of the section had to do with agricultural workers in the south actually who were a lot of the worst off african-americans of any race or color, and a lot of the companies that came to the civil rights section were from agricultural workers in the south who were essentially held in slavery and formed involuntary servitude, and they asked the civil rights section for help coming and they actually prosecuted individual employers for holding their employees and involuntary servitude, and they went on from those agricultural cases to cases of domestic workers which involves african-american women and those workers complained not just that they were being held against their will because often they were about to go to the store by themselves or leave their employers present, but they were so subjugated to them they were kept in attics or

coupes. they will pay almost nothing for their labor there never given days off and they were prosecuted and which they say even though they were not held in chains, even though they were not being held by coercion, this is a form of slavery and people can't treat other people this way. >> when did the term civil rights come into our lexicon and when did civil rights legislation or actions start to develop? >> it's an interesting question coming in american history means different things over different periods of time. one of the things i discovered as i read this book is that during the early 20th century, civil rights largely referred to property rights and contract rights of individuals who wanted to be free to contract with employers or employees or property owners without interference from the

government. and in the mid 1930's the new deal regulation of the economy those are problematic. every individual cannot have the right to contract to take on dangerous work. we have agencies now that say you can't do that. they come to a collective labor rights, rights to collectively bargain the union and the national labor relations act and fair labor act are all kind of protected and then something interesting happened which is in the 1940's and 1950's civil rights becomes much more entwined with race. but that doesn't always been the case and that changes. one of the evidence is that it isn't always clear that civil rights means voting rights or that civil rights been the right to eat at a restaurant on and on segregated basis. if you look back at the civil

war and reconstruction era when the amendment which is one of the main amendments that supports the rights today was ratified, people thought that civil rights for about owning property and sitting on juries and being able to sue in court, but not about what they called social rights being able to go to a hotel or write in a streetcar or attend a school and certainly not political life or voting rights, so a definition that we have coming out of the civil-rights movement in the 1960's is different from multiple changes in definitions you see over the course of american history. >> where did you grow up and get interested in this topic? >> i grew up in brooklyn and when i grew up, my manager for it was to be an american based on my own family when we had a very robust sense of our family history was to come from eastern europe and go through the island and to the low east side and then eventually have a book.

i got to college and i can across james goodman and a book he wrote called stories of scottsboro and i ended of taking a class with him on the american south in the 1920's and 1930's. >> had you ever visited? >> i had not. we had gone to monticello as a child but i had never thought about a completely different kind of america with completely different races and ethnic and religion and everyone i knew it was a few generations in america. very different racial politics and i spent several summers in college in the south, and i spent time after i graduated from college in the south, and i just thought that it was really a world very unlike what i have experienced all the one of the things i discovered in writing this book was that we think of jim crow as a southern experience and i don't think that is true anymore.

there's a lot about jim-crow if you understand it more broadly than was true of the whole nation to reassertion the forms of the segregation march largely limited but not entirely at all. but a lot of the more economic forms of exploitation existed nationally, and part of why i think we haven't gone as far in getting to civil rights as i would like to see us do because we defined the problem as a problem of law and then we thought we fixed that, but it was a national problem of law and economics and culture and society and politics, and we haven't actually figured out how to talk about the rest of it all that well. professor golubuff, why you call that the lost promise? >> because i think lawyers in the 1940's had a sense of what it would take to undermine jim-crow that we lost after

brown v board of education. that we could have had an interpretation of the constitution that would have been much more efficacious undermining all of these parts of jim crow and instead we underline one partly, but a victory, and i think that captures -- it's understandable. brown was a victory. i don't want to say it wasn't but we like to build on victories. we don't want to go back and say wait there's all this other stuff we didn't get to do and we should do it hollered to the canal. it's harder for lawyers to work in the categories after brown. they want to build on those categories and that makes sense but i think we left a lot on the table. >> is a photograph from the 1940's and it's an african-american family living in a rural area. they are looking in the future. even though it's called the lost promise of civil rights and even though that title is a bit pass

sestak i like that she was standing sort of determined and optimistic looking out and ready to take on what ever there was to take on. >> risa goluboff this year the university of jinnah the coverage and this is her book the lost promise of civil rights published by harvard.

the crisis they say it happens slowly and then quickly, and that was absolutely the case at wamu. it began to get very bad. all of their issues internally, their internal controls had just fallen apart. at one point they were making mortgages on 12 different systems. they had grown so fast that there was no control internally. adel mortgage division had ballooned out of control. they have a massive trading desk. they had turned into not a mortgage lender they were only 15 years earlier but almost a