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Delgado on the Origins of Critical Race Theory

By Lawrence Solum

Richard Delgado (Seattle University School of Law) has posted Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory (Iowa Law Review, Vol. 94, p. 1505, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

I wrote this piece exploring some of the intellectual origins of critical race theory for a 20-year anniversary of the movement held at the University of Iowa in April, 2009. In it, I look at the role of certain prominent university officers in purging their ranks of white radicals to prepare the way, in the late sixties and early seventies, for the first large group of post-Brown minority students who were starting to arrive around that time. I show how four promising white professors, two of law, one of history, and one of criminology lost their jobs and what they did afterward. I show that they continued to teach and write about left-wing thought in the hinterlands in ways that contributed to the rise of critical race theory. As they say, it is hard to kill an idea.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 28, 2010 (boomark / email).