Kenneth Mack has an interesting article (.pdf) in the latest issue of the Yale Law Journal on the history of the civil rights movement. From the introduction:

  The Brown v. Board of Education litigation, and the Supreme Court decision that it produced, have cast a long shadow over the legal historiography of the civil rights movement. The Brown litigation has become the lodestar for a "legal liberal" interpretation of civil rights history. Its core elements have become familiar: courts as the primary engines of social transformation; formal conceptual categories such as rights and formal remedies such as school desegregation decrees, as the principal mechanisms for accomplishing that change; and a focus on reforming public institutions (or, in some versions, public and private institutions without much distinction) as a means of transforming the larger society. Legal liberalism, of course, is an ideal type, and scholars have given varying emphases to its core elements in their accounts of civil rights law and politics. Nonetheless, the legal history of civil rights has been written with the Brown decision at its centerpiece, telling the story, in effect, of the antecedents and consequences of Brown. Civil rights history remains, at its core, the story of how African-American communities, and the lawyers and organizations that supported them, struggled to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, attack de jure segregation, produce the triumph of legal liberalism in Brown, and effectively implement Brown's antidiscrimination mandate.
  I will argue in this Article that the legal liberal interpretation of civil rights history is a myth —- at least as it applies to the African-American civil rights bar during the period between World War I and II. That is, this interpretation is less an engagement with the complicated civil rights politics that had emerged by the middle of the twentieth century than a historical interpretation that helped scholars, commentators, and civil rights lawyers themselves make sense of American politics in the late twentieth century.

  For responses to Mack's article by Michael Klarman and others, and to participate in a discussion of it, check out The Pocket Part.