Putting labor, civil rights, and civil liberties at the center of the American story

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on John Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

Risa Goluboff

I first encountered the Garland Fund more than 20 years ago, when Mark Tushnet described the key role the Fund’s “Margold Report” played in developing the NAACP’s litigation strategy in the 1930s. Drawing on Tushnet’s work in my own book on pre-Brown attacks on racial and economic inequality, I used the Margold Report largely as evidence of the NAACP’s relative disinterest in Black labor and the issues Black workers faced under Jim Crow. My approach to the Garland Fund was thus fleeting and piecemeal. To the extent that I noticed the many famous figures involved in the Fund, or that I was surprised that the Fund had approved the NAACP’s proposal despite the apparent divergence between the Fund’s focus on labor and the NAACP’s lack thereof, I did not pursue such leads. Like Tushnet before me, I came at the Garland Fund from one particular angle: as a small but important part of the NAACP’s developing legal strategy.

How lucky for me, and for us all, that John Witt has now put the Garland Fund squarely at the center not only of his own story but, in many ways, of the entire history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. What makes the breadth and ambition of Witt’s book possible is the breadth and ambition that he has uncovered in the Fund itself: It was capacious enough to welcome the likes of Roger Baldwin and James Weldon Johnson and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and many more. It simultaneously promoted “labor fairness and racial equality and basic human freedoms” like free speech (541). The Fund drew on federal Indian law and decades-old anti-Chinese American discrimination cases to produce the NAACP’s litigation blueprint, and it funded lawyers in causes as disparate as Ossian Sweet and Scottsboro. Its work ranged from the United Mine Workers to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and ultimately to the origins of the CIO. It defended everyone from Scopes to Sacco and Vanzetti.  Witt shows how the Fund laid the groundwork for so much of mid-century America’s activism, litigation, political culture, and reform. In Witt’s telling, the Fund’s impact was a feat of great proportions for such a small band of activists and intellectuals. And his telling of their story is its own feat of prodigious historical research, narrative elegance, and no small contemporary impact.

In placing “the world of the Garland Fund” at the center of his story, Witt reveals new intersections between race and labor. Though Witt critiques “the long civil rights movement” for its preoccupation with the dichotomy between grassroots organizing and litigation, I would place Witt within that historiographical tradition. (I wonder whether he would place himself there.) Witt is certainly right that debates about methods of social change are a part of the long civil rights movement historiography, but I take its hallmarks to be (1) that the civil rights movement began long before its most visible phase in the 1950s and 1960s, and (2) that Jim Crow’s sprawling and integrated system of racial subordination and class exploitation led to social movements that countered both of those aspects, often together. The excavations of that literature made visible both temporal and economic developments that had become hard to see.

Witt’s contributions to the long civil rights movement are threefold. First, in contrast to most of that literature—which takes a person, place, or civil rights or labor organization or two as its subject—Witt’s focus on the Garland Fund enables him to encompass the stories of many groups, people, and places at once. Shifting the lens from the NAACP or the CIO to the Fund makes the breadth and depth of the connections between race and labor both more extensive and more visible. To be sure, not every organization Witt describes as part of the Garland Fund network took the relationship between racial inequality and labor exploitation as their focus, or did so uniformly or continuously. But the overlapping relationships of so many organizations in and around the Garland Fund add much heft to the connection between race and labor. The Fund’s unique network of individuals, organizations, and ideas pushed forward in tandem and in conflict, with many springboarding and learning from the others.

Indeed, Witt’s contribution to the long civil rights story goes two giant steps further. The first step results from his depiction not only of race and labor, but of race, labor, and civil liberties. Until now, historians have connected civil rights and labor, civil rights and civil liberties, and civil liberties and labor, but they have rarely linked all three. With Roger Baldwin at the center of the Garland Fund, the Fund was always deeply concerned with and embedded in the fight for free speech, which itself was embedded in, and often in tension with, the fight for labor rights. Witt transcends historical and historiographical segmentation by tracing every race, labor, and civil liberties spoke through the Garland Fund’s hub. Moreover, he does not leave those spokes in their singular spoke-ness. He shows how their crossing through the hub changed them, recombined them, propagated new ideas, and amplified their power. Following all three stories back to their origins and forward to their immense influence by mid-century, Witt opens up and integrates “the interconnectedness of the core projects of modern American liberalism” (9).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Witt places that tripartite story at the center not only of his history, but of the history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This is certainly a book of civil rights history, labor history, and civil liberties history, both each separately and very much together. But in telling those combined histories, Witt has shown them to be the very essence of American history. To those of us who have toiled in the trenches of a long civil rights movement often deemed somewhat marginal to the great American project, the ambition of that claim is welcome indeed.