A traditional approach to civil rights history is that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to break down the barriers between black and white institutions by unswervingly attacking the Supreme Court “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The NAACP advanced this in the courts through attacking unequal facilities between black and white schools which culminated in the Brown case of 1954, which opened the way to the tumult of the social upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, such an account has passed into the fable of the civil rights movement. Jonas's book is entirely on board for this account of civil rights history and presents us with a positive account of the NAACP and argues that many of its leaders and campaigns warrant greater attention and praise by historians and the public. Goluboff, on the other hand, offers a substantial reassessment of how civil rights was defined in the first half of the twentieth century and how the promise of serious economic reform was subsumed to more bourgeois ideals of integration.

Freedom's Sword, originally published in 2004, is reissued in paperback to much acclamation. The author, a journalist, worked for the NAACP and eventually became a senior adviser to its executive director, Roy Wilkins. Jonas sets himself a formidable task of covering a sixty-year period of the NAACP and his explicit objective is to raise its profile in the American public mind by placing the organization in its rightful place as the “heart of the civil rights movement and its only muscle” (351). A huge amount of ground is covered from the NAACP's origins in 1909 and the tome hits all the familiar buttons along the way to the Brown decision and the broader civil rights movement of the 1960s. If Jonas has a hero to the piece then it is Roy Wilkins, the “Gentle Giant” (303), whose reputation is dwarfed by more charismatic figures of the period. However, Jonas attempts to elevate Wilkins by diminishing, amongst others, Martin Luther King's contribution to the struggle, which is questioned in the curious manner of length of service to the cause: “Wilkins' civil rights contributions covered at least 46 years … whereas King's not more than 13” (349). Overall the book feels very much like one of the NAACP's more worthy campaigns in promoting the best of American middle-class social and economic ideals and is accepting of the general progressive march of history. Overall the book brings together much breadth of study and is a good starting point for those unfamiliar with the NAACP's vital work.

Goluboff's impressive book The Lost Promise of Civil Rights is a work steeped in the prospect of history as a range of possibilities rather than producing a simple progressive narrative. Starting with the premise that most scholars have “lavished attention” on the Brown case “as the pivotal moment in the creation of modern civil rights doctrine” (4), Goluboff accuses such a focus of limiting “our imaginations … about the possibilities for constitutional redress of material inequalities” (270). Goluboff convincingly details a multifaceted movement that could have gone along any number of routes in seeking equality in the United States for African Americans. Indeed the possibilities that were pursued in the early days of the civil rights struggle were often based on equality of rights presented by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Constitutional Amendments dating back to the Reconstruction era, and were reinforced and expanded upon by the labour and economic agenda of the New Deal in the 1930s. Indeed the New Deal's potential represented the “most politically promising civil rights issues” of the 1940s (9). The Thirteenth Amendment's proscription on involuntary servitude and President Roosevelt's approach to national economic integration held a distinct attraction to many civil rights lawyers in attacking Jim Crow laws along economic lines. Goluboff convincingly shows us an America where black workers were less interested in ideals of integrating the workforce than in “the chance to make a fair living … at all” (242). The story of how the NAACP dabbled with a possible economic approach to black workers' rights while eventually returning to its middle-class roots in targeting Plessy, while “labor-related cases disappeared from their litigation agenda” (235), is the key moment in our constitutional understanding of how civil rights became widely defined.

While Jonas presents us with a familiar world in which he details how a great organization and its remarkable leaders changed America for the better, Goluboff notes that with the limiting effects of the NAACP's Brown decision there would be no immediate redress of the inherent economic inequities of apartheid America.