MAKING CIVIL RIGHTS LAW

Tushnet (Law Center/Georgetown) offers an absorbing account of the legal struggles, led by Thurgood Marshall, to achieve civil rights for African-Americans. Had Marshall never sat on the US Supreme Court, he would have won an enduring place in American legal history for his work as general counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, when he helped to create a massive body of civil rights law that at last gave some substance to the Constitution's promises of equality of opportunity and racial justice. Here, Tushnet tells of Marshall's early education under Howard University's Charles Hamilton Houston, who taught Marshall how litigation could be used as a tool for social engineering. Although Marshall tried to carry on a conventional legal practice in Baltimore, he was drawn to the work of the NAACP; by 1936, he was working for the NAACP full-time in New York. Tushnet recounts the NAACP's often unsuccessful struggles in the lower courts, the hostile and sometimes violent resistance met by NAACP plaintiffs and lawyers in the courts of the South, and the long and frustratingly slow processes of developing factual records and arguing appeals. Nonetheless, Marshall and his legal team achieved important results in several areas that were pervaded by racial segregation, in all of which he won victories before the US Supreme Court: desegregating universities; attacking racially restrictive covenants in housing contracts; and challenging rules of parties and private political organizations that allowed only whites to vote in primaries. Yet these victories left intact Plessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 Supreme Court precedent that permitted legalized racial segregation. Tushnet devotes most of his account to the long, slow development of the record in Brown v. Board of Education (1955), the briefing and argument in that historic case, the Court's decision to overturn Plessy, and the stormy, often bloody aftermath. An important and well-told account of the often-neglected legal struggle for civil rights.