A Defiant Life
Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America
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Publisher Description
Thurgood Marshall's extraordinary contribution to civil rights and overcoming racism is more topical than ever, as the national debate on race and the overturning of affirmative action policies make headlines nationwide. Howard Ball, author of eighteen books on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, has done copious research for this incisive biography to present an authoritative portrait of Marshall the jurist.
Born to a middle-class black family in "Jim Crow" Baltimore at the turn of the century, Marshall's race informed his worldview from an early age. He was rejected by the University of Maryland Law School because of the color of his skin. He then attended Howard University's Law School, where his racial consciousness was awakened by the brilliant lawyer and activist Charlie Houston. Marshall suddenly knew what he wanted to be: a civil rights lawyer, one of Houston's "social engineers." As the chief attorney for the NAACP, he developed the strategy for the legal challenge to racial discrimination. His soaring achievements and his lasting impact on the nation's legal system--as the NAACP's advocate, as a federal appeals court judge, as President Lyndon Johnson's solicitor general, and finally as the first African American Supreme Court Justice--are symbolized by Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that ended legal segregation in public schools.
Using race as the defining theme, Ball spotlights Marshall's genius in working within the legal system to further his lifelong commitment to racial equality. With the help of numerous, previously unpublished sources, Ball presents a lucid account of Marshall's illustrious career and his historic impact on American civil rights.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thurgood Marshall's long and influential life of challenging racism and championing affirmative action makes him prime biography material today. Ball, a political science professor at the University of Vermont and author of 16 previous books on the federal judiciary, expertly interweaves Marshall's life with the history of civil rights in America. From the rise of the NAACP--which coincided roughly with Marshall's 1908 birth in segregated Baltimore--to Brown v. The Board of Education, a case that Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953, we see Marshall as a towering figure, an indefatigable adversary of the ruthless and endemic racial discrimination that surrounded him much of his life. As Ball's focus is on legal history, other civil rights leaders, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., are barely mentioned. In contrast to Juan Williams in his recent biography, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (Times Books), Ball skims over Marshall's personal life, either downplaying or omitting details of his heavy drinking, sexual misconduct, poor health, virulent anticommunism and general cantankerousness. Instead, Ball devotes nearly 200 absorbing pages to Marshall's Supreme Court tenure and casework, presenting detailed--but very clear--analyses of pivotal cases in which Marshall was involved, as a NAACP lawyer, as a U.S. Solicitor General and as the first black judge appointed to the Supreme Court. Those cases are Marshall's legacy, and Ball's fine biography places his subject's legal accomplishments squarely in the context of American history. Photos not seen by PW.
