Marshalling Justice
The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“[An] important collection….Michael G. Long deserves high praise indeed for unearthing [Marshall’s letters] and bringing them to light.”
—Wil Haygood
Collected together for the first time in Marshalling Justice, here are selected letters written by one of the most influential and important activists in the American Civil Rights movement: the brilliant legal mind and footsoldier for justice and racial equality, Thurgood Marshall. The correspondences of a rebellious young attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Marshalling Justice paints an eye-opening portrait of Thurgood Marshall before he became the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, during his years as a groundbreaking and vibrant Civil Rights activist in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Julian Bond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers for whom Marshall is best known for arguing and winning Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 and becoming the first African-American Supreme Court Justice in 1967 will find this collection of letters written between 1935 and 1957 thoroughly illuminating. Long's introductions lend a fluidity and coherence to the book; he presents each letter with so much context that the book has elements of a biography of Marshall and a history of the civil rights movement. The letters which span Marshall's legal career from his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, in 1936 contain a rich vein of local history as well as correspondence concerning his major cases. Nor does Marshall's major case law focus deter him from attention to media misrepresentation, racial inequities in pay, military racism, or accounts of prison abuse and the persistence of lynching. "At times," Marshall wrote in 1949, "I get a little anxious about people who have no regard whatsoever for the amount of time necessary for lawyers to prepare this involved type of litigation." These letters offer a welcome and readable inner glimpse into that laborious and complex work. Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the
