>> university of virginia professor, risa goluboff type to the tv about herb hook, "the lost promise of civil rights." the interview is part of the tedious college series.

it's just over 10 minutes. >> "the lost promise of civil rights" was published by harvard university press. the author is risa goluboff at university of virginia. what is the civil rights section? >> a unit of the united states federal government, just before world war ii. one of his creative is part of the department of justice. it's charge to protect individual rights, fundamental individual rights. people aren't sure what that meant. they were trained to collectively bargain and organize into unions. when world war ii started, greece became much but a prominent in the civil rights

section and as a result start to think about how to write the workers. it takes a whole bunch of cases in which the rights of black workers are at stake and prosecutes all kinds of employers for violations of civil rights laws. >> host: was defined by executive order? >> guest: is formed by president frank was about and at their request of the attorney general and frank murphy was a big labor guide. he was from michigan. he was a very big supporter of labor union and he goes on to a career as a supreme court justice commences at the product of individual rights as well. >> host: what kind of pricey to get when it was first formed? just go there with him that controversy.

a lot of what it does over the course of world war ii i think it can need because it's small and largely flies below the radar screen. >> host: does it still exists? >> guest: i came the civil rights division of the department of justice and 1857, so it doubles in 1957 and becomes its only division aggression against much bigger come, specially in 1864 civil rights act of the 1960 voting rights act. the number of lawyers in it that is gross. in a way to still exist. >> host: how does the civil rights section tie into the title of your book, "the lost promise of civil rights"? >> guest: is crucial to the title of my book. so it's basically a bus of between the new deal in the 1930s in brown v. board of education in 1954. the idea is to think what civil

rights looked like before brown. ron tells us one vision of civil rights comment that jim crow was a state mandated segregation in brown versus the board of education that's not constitutional and we know from there into a new era of civil rights. what civil rights look like before brown, before we had that idea of jim crow? index of a black workers rights killers to do for them, what they thought jim crow did to them and how it harms none and in their idea was a lot prouder than brown versus board of education. it's not only was saying that black children are my children go to different schools. it's not only anti-miscegenation laws. it's also employers who only higher weight or hire african-americans only for the worst paid and most dangerous

and worse condition jobs. if the federal government and the state government interfering in the economy and racially discriminatory ways. the image that comes out other cases that takes on african-american workers reveal a jim crow that is much more total, much more about deprivation and exploitation as well as stigma and symbolism and state-mandated thought. >> host: during that period, what with some of the success civil rights section? >> guest: the big success of the civil rights section had to do with agricultural workers in the south actually who are really a lot of the worse off of african-americans in any race or color. a lot of the complaints were from agricultural workers in this house in forms of

involuntary servitude. nasa civil rights for help and civil rights section prosecuted individual employers for holding their employees and involuntary servitude. they would not do as agricultural cases to cases of domestic workers such about african-american women and those workers complain that not just a ripping hunt against their will because often they were allowed to go to the store by themselves or leave their employers presents, but there is so subjugated they were and she concludes, paid almost been for the laborer. they were never given days off in the cases the prosecution said even though they weren't held in chains, even though they weren't held a coercion, this is a form of slavery and people can't treat other people this way. >> host: when did the term

civil rights conmen and prior to the area you are talking about, when the civil rights legislation are action start to go away? >> guest: the term civil rights has a long history and it means different things over different periods of time. one of the things i discovered was during the early 20th century, civil rights largely refer to property rights and contract rights of individuals who wanted to be free to contract with employers or employees or property owners without interference in the government. in the mid-1930s new deal regulation of the economy, if you're going have large-scale interventions come to every individual can have a right to contract and take on dangerous work with no protections. we have agencies that say you can't do that. so in the 1930s, civil rights comes to refer to collectively per rights, rights to

collectively bargain and join the union and the kind of right the national labor relations act and the fair labor ask all protected. and then something interesting happens which in the 1940s and 50s, civil rights becomes much more entwined with race. but that's not always been the case monopoly changes. one of the interesting things is it's not good to civil rights means voting rights for the civil rights means the right to even a restaurant and a non-segregated basis. if you look back at the civil war and the reconstruction era when the 14th amendment supports civil rights today was ratified, people thought civil rights are about owning property in making contracts in sitting on juries and being able to sue in court. but not about what they call social rights, have been able to go to a hotel or write on a streetcar or go to a restaurant

and not political rights. the definition we have a civil rights coming out of the civil rights movement from multiple changes in definitions you see over the course of american history. >> host: ready to go out? >> guest: i grew up in brooklyn and what it was based on my own family where we had a very robust than in our family has. was you go through ellis island and i got to college and i came across james goodman in a book he wrote called stories of scottsboro. i wrote a class on the american south. we had gone to monticello and new orleans, but i really never thought about a completely different america with different

relations and histories and everyone i neo is a few generations in america. generation after generation in different racial politics and i then spent several summers in college in the south. i spent time after i graduated i just thought it was really a world very unlike what i experience, although one of the things i discovered was we think of jim crow is a southern experience and i'll think that's true anymore. there's a lot of that jim crow if you understood it more broadly the mr. of the whole nation. certain forms of the state-mandated aspects of segregation or lurches limited although not entirely at all, but that a lot of the more private economic forms of exploitation and part of why we

haven't gone as far in getting to civil rights as i would like to see us do and define the problem as a southern problem of law and without we fixed a southern problem of law. it was society and we haven't actually talked about the rest of it all that well. >> host: why do you call it the last province? >> guest: i call it that because the lawyers in the 1940s had a sense of what it would take to undermine jim crow to the last after brown versus board of education, that we could've had an interpretation of our constitution that would have banned much more efficacious and undermining all the skirts of jim crow and instead we undermanned one part and my home. i think we got captured. it's understandable, right? was a huge victory. i don't want to say it wasn't.

but we don't want to go back and say there's all this other stuff we didn't get to do and we should do it now. the smart charter could associate for layers. they want to build on this category is to not make sense, but i think we ought on the table. >> host: was this photograph? >> guest: is a photograph in the 1940s and it's an african-american family living in a rural area. they're looking at the future. even though his last cause of the civil rights and is a bit pessimistic, i'm a hardened pessimist and i like them standing determined to not do mistakenly came out and ready to take on whatever there was to take on. >> host: risa goluboff is a professor at university of virginia. this is her book, "the lost promise of civil rights" published by harvard.

we sat down at alondra nelson to talk about her book, "body and