The structural context of novel rights claims: Southern civil rights organizing, 1961-1966

Theorists of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) have argued that the abstract, in dividualistic, and state-dependent character of rights makes them of dubiou s value for groups fighting for social change. Southern civil rights organi zers in the early 1960s engaged in the kind of power-oriented strategy that CLS writers advocate in lieu of a rights-oriented one. However, the rights claims they made inside and outside courtrooms were essential to their pol itical organizing efforts. Far from narrowing collective aspirations to the limits of the law, activists' extension of rights claims to the "unqualifi ed" legitimated assaults on economic inequality, governmental decisionmakin g in poverty programs, and the Vietnam War. What made possible this novel f ormulation was not only the multivalent character of rights but also key fe atures of the social, political, and organizational contexts within which r ights were advanced.