The Thirteenth Amendment and the lost origins of civil rights

For the fifteen years prior to the Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, "civil rights" did not refer to a unified, coherent cat egory. Rather, the content of the term was open, changing, and contradictor y. The lawyers of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, wh ich was created in 1939, were among those thinking about, and experimenting with, different ways of practicing and framing civil rights in the 1940s. Their practice shows how, as the Great Depression faded and World War II lo omed, the most prominent civil rights issues shifted from the labor arena t o the rights of minorities, especially African Americans. Because of the do ctrinal uncertainties that accompanied the demise of the Lochner era, the l awyers of the Civil Rights Section looked to Reconstruction for inspiration , constitutional authority, and federal power. As the Section lawyers explo red the boundaries of their new authority, they emphasized enforcement of t he Thirteenth Amendment and involuntary servitude statutes. They came to us e the Thirteenth Amendment as a vehicle for attacking legal and economic co ercion broadly defined. This Article narrates the history of the Civil Rights Section and analyzes its practice as a moment in the creation of modern civil rights law. Emphas izing that the wartime turn to racial issues did not eliminate labor from t he Section civil rights practice, it describes the resonances between the S ection civil rights framework-and its uses of the Thirteenth Amendment in p articular-and both Reconstruction era and New Deal notions of free labor. V iewed against the backdrop of a historical concern with labor and the mid-c entury realities of involuntary servitude, we can see in the Section practi ce a framework for a labor-infused civil rights that has, for the most part , since been lost.