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Legal History

Civil Rights and Discrimination

Selected Works

Susan D. Carle

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Conceptions Of Agency In Social Movement Scholarship: Mack On African American Civil Rights Lawyers [Comments], Susan D. Carle Dec 2013

Conceptions Of Agency In Social Movement Scholarship: Mack On African American Civil Rights Lawyers [Comments], Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)-namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites …