Andrew Lanham (University of Houston Law Center) has posted "How W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Antiwar Movement Reimagined Civil Rights and the Laws of War and Peace." The article appears in Volume 99 of the Washington Law Review (2024). The abstract:
This Article reconstructs the history of Black antiwar activism in the
twentieth-century United States and argues that Black antiwar activists
played a significant but largely forgotten role in the development of
both modern civil rights law and the international law of war and peace.
The Article focuses on the career of W.E.B. Du Bois, tracing how he
built coalitions between civil rights and antiwar organizations to
pursue a series of shared legal campaigns. Du Bois’s antiwar work was
also representative of a larger tradition, and his career illuminates
how a range of Black activists and civil rights lawyers like Pauli
Murray, Prentice Thomas, Ella Baker, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
creatively merged civil rights and antiwar protest.
These
activists redefined the very idea of peace, as both a legal and a
political category, to include racial equality. As a result of that
conceptual shift, they also advocated for a much richer set of legal
proposals to regulate warfare. While mainstream white peace activists
and international lawyers in the first half of the twentieth century
emphasized a formalistic legal ban on war, Du Bois and other Black
activists consistently pursued a much more radical set of structural
interventions in the socio-economic system that they believed would,
functionally, help to prevent war. Their proposed interventions included
global decolonization, economic redistribution, and equal civil,
political, and socio-economic rights, which they saw as the path to
lasting peace.
This Article recovers the legal and
intellectual history of that more radical vision for the law of peace.
It shows how a “long antiwar movement” collaborated with the
better-known “long civil rights movement” across the twentieth century,
and it traces how those collaborations helped remake civil rights and
global governance. The Article then explores the normative lessons this
history holds for vital debates today about movement building, movement
lawyering, and the best legal tools to secure racial equality and
constrain the use of military force.
The full article is available here.
-- Karen Tani