Race, Labor, and the Thirteenth Amendment in the 1940s Department of Justice

Abstract

A number of articles for this symposium concern the labor pedigree of the Thirteenth Amendment. Several others discuss the Amendment's relationship to race-based civil rights. That separate articles address these two issues is unsurprising. In contemporary legal culture, labor questions and race questions often occupy separate spheres. But the history I explore in this article predates that division; it shows how, at least at one critical moment in time, the Thirteenth Amendment defied the current dichotomy between labor issues and race-based civil rights.