Julius Chambers
A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation's leading African American civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark.
In this biography, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect the details of Chambers's life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel's lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, they reveal Chambers's singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The name Julius Chambers may not be as familiar to most readers as those of Thurgood Marshall or other leading figures in the legal struggle to advance the cause of African-American civil rights, but as Rosen, emeritus professor of law at UNC Chapel Hill, and Mosnier, of North Carolina State University's Institute for Emerging Issues, show in this first biography of this crusading attorney, he would "help change the face of North Carolina and the nation." That Chambers was able to join the legal profession was itself a huge achievement. Born in rural North Carolina in the midst of the Depression, he attended schools that were deficient even by the standards of the Jim Crow South. But the young man was energized by the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision opposing segregation, which to him "was the signal I could do anything." Chambers's accomplishments include becoming the first African-American editor of a white Southern law review, joining the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and challenging the racial order of deeply segregated Charlotte, N.C. Some readers may find Rosen and Mosnier's book excessively long and detailed, but it's an excellent resource for understanding how the civil rights struggle played out in less-heralded venues.
