History: Reviews of New Books

ISSN: 0361-2759 (Print) 1930-8280 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhis20

The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil

Rights Era

Mark Tushnet

To cite this article: Mark Tushnet (2019) The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights
Era, History: Reviews of New Books, 47:1, 2-2, DOI: 10.1080/03612759.2019.1543448

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2019.1543448

Published online: 25 Mar 2019.

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2 HISTORY: Reviews of New Books
perfect fairy palace—beautiful beyond
description” (87). Walt Whitman,
enchanted by the sculptures, visited so
often that police grew suspicious (94).
Filled with an overwhelming number of
displays, the exhibition was described
as a “wilderness of objects” by a south-
ern visitor (111). Burrows does a fan-
tastic job of allowing readers to feel the
same wonder that visitors felt upon
entering the bustling, impressive space
and seeing all that it contained.
After the exhibition ended, follow-
ing many debates and battles over the
future of the site, the American
Institute rented the hall for its autumn
fairs. The fire brought the arguments
over the hall’s future to an end.
Collectors purchased relicts from the
burnt remains of the building, and con-
struction crews cleared the debris, but
the city ultimately decided not to
rebuild. Burrows argues that the polit-
ical crises in the years leading up to
the Civil War took the Crystal Palace
off the front page of the news and led
Americans to forget it.
In the introduction, Burrows taunts
readers not only with the idea that this
exhibit was a turning point for New
York City in its transformation to a
more cosmopolitan tourist destination,
but also that it showed a movement
away from the republican simplicity
embraced by earlier generations. I
would have loved to see him linger on
that last point more throughout the
book. Still, this is a delightful read
that brings a once-famous but now for-
gotten building back to life.
CATHERINE McNEUR
Portland State University
Copyright # 2019 Taylor & Francis
Schmidt, Christopher W.
The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal
Change in the Civil Rights Era
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
260 pp., Paper $30.00,
ISBN 9780226522449
Publication Date: March 2018
In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal
Change in the Civil Rights Era, legal
historian Christopher Schmidt updates
and extends William Chafe’s classic
Civilities and Civil Rights (Oxford
University Press 1980). Chafe’s was a
local history of civil rights in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Taking a
dramaturgical perspective, Schmidt
expands the characters and locations;
he is concerned as much with the law
associated with the sit-ins as with the
motivations and ideological meanings
behind them. Perhaps because he is
writing in the modern tradition of
socio-legal studies, Schmidt also
invokes concepts associated with the
literature on social and political mobil-
ization. Historians may find these rela-
tively unobtrusive discussions less
valuable than the narratives Schmidt
lays out.
Schmidt begins where he must,
with the students who initiated the sit-
ins. He crisply sets out their motiva-
tions and concerns, in passing address-
ing (and rejecting) recent claims that
Brown v. Board of Education played
no significant role in generating the
1960s civil rights movement. The next
chapter discusses the legal and tactical
problems the sit-ins posed for NAACP
lawyers accustomed to bringing test
cases where their clients challenged the
laws, then receded into the background.
Two chapters dealing with the
movement’s supporters and opponents
follow. Schmidt shows how the sit-ins
shifted understandings about the best
tactics for achieving racial equality,
from legal challenges to segregation
on Brown’s model to direct action and
civil disobedience of laws demonstra-
tors believed to be unjust, even if con-
stitutionally permissible.
Schmidt emphasizes the diversity
among those opposed to the sit-ins,
noting, as did Chafe, that some local
businessmen took a far more prag-
matic approach to segregation in their
facilities than did politicians and, espe-
cially, ideologues. He shows how the
legal framework within which the sit-
ins were placed provided a common
language for opposition to—and prag-
matic accommodation of—the sit-ins.
The key element in that framework,
for the movement’s opponents, was a
clearly stated but imperfectly defined
rule, the state action doctrine, holding
that the Constitution’s restrictions did
not apply to acts taken by private
actors, including the operators of lunch
counters and restaurants. For politi-
cians and ideologues, the state-action
doctrine showed that the demonstra-
tors had no legal basis for their chal-
lenges; the doctrine also told
pragmatic accommodationists that
they should be left alone by segrega-
tionist politicians to develop whatever
practices they found most profitable.
The book’s final third deals with
the sit-in issue in the Supreme Court
and Congress. As students of the
court’s confrontation with the sit-ins
know, the justices had a great deal of
difficulty with the sit-ins. The reason
was that the best-developed legal rule
about racial equality—racial segrega-
tion mandated by law—clashed with
the state-action doctrine. The justices
repeatedly strove to find state action in
the sit-in cases, with sometimes
implausible doctrinal results. A major-
ity desperately struggled to avoid giv-
ing a public relations victory to
segregationists; a persistent minority
on the Court insisted that the cases
typically involved only private action.
Schmidt brings these doctrinal and
personal clashes to the attention of a
larger audience.
The legal issues raised by the sit-in
cases were resolved when Congress
enacted the public accommodation pro-
visions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Congress relied on its power to regulate
commerce “among the several States,”
rather than relying directly on constitu-
tional ideas of equality. Examining con-
gressional debates and the thinking of
congressional leaders, Schmidt shows
how Congress managed to fit concerns
about racial equality into a more trad-
itional commercial framework.
The book is gracefully written and
should serve well as an introduction to
the sit-in movement in undergraduate
and graduate courses on civil rights and
constitutional history. Its focus on the
personalities; the motivations; and, in
particular, the legal and constitutional
dimensions of the sit-in movement
makes it a significant contribution.
MARK TUSHNET
Harvard Law School
Copyright # 2019 Taylor & Francis