The question of economic justice for Black Americans continues to be the subject of contentious political debate. Here, Michael K. Brown examines the meaning of racial equality during three transformative periods when economic opportunity appeared to be a real possibility: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Political leaders who believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people enacted policies to rehabilitate formerly subjugated individuals. Black Americans, on the other hand, repudiated the idea that they were damaged people in need of repair. Repeatedly, Black people’s vision of economic justice was based on antiprivilege egalitarianism, the idea that a just restitution for their oppression required abolishing the political and legal privileges whites had acquired. Black opposition reveals what was at stake at each historical moment and what might constitute economic justice in the twenty-first century.

About the Author

Michael K. Brown is Professor Emeritus of Politics at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of Race, Money, and the American Welfare State and coauthor of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society.

Reviews

"Unjust Restitution challenges us to think more deeply about a deceptively simple idea: 'equality of opportunity.' Michael K. Brown successfully bridges many different fields that usually ignore or speak past each other to show how the idea of equality of opportunity traveled across time and space as part of a century's long quest for racial and economic justice."—Kimberley Johnson, author of Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown

"In a time when seventeen states are reviewing legislation designed to jail librarians for providing access to books that tell the history of slavery and its tumultuous aftermath, Michael K. Brown has produced the appropriate response: Unjust Restitution is a meticulously documented, richly textured account of the many ways Black resistance to white supremacist policies has been a multipronged enduring core of US race relations for two centuries. This volume will be a rich resource for legal scholars and social scientists for decades."—Troy Duster, coauthor of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society

"Thoroughly researched and supported by persuasive evidence, Unjust Restitution makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between federal reform efforts and African Americans' struggles for racial and economic justice."—Greta de Jong, author of You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement

"Michael K. Brown has written a masterful book about both the ambitions and difficulties inherent in foundational civil rights reform. Elegantly written and brilliantly researched, Brown finds through his examination of three major reform eras—Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty—that civil rights activists were consistently frustrated by the limited ideological and socioeconomic vision of liberal policy elites. As he has throughout his sterling career, Brown powerfully illuminates the necessity of confronting historically entrenched racial discrimination with fundamental reforms to the nation’s political economy."—Paul Frymer, author of Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion