Tushnet (Law Center/Georgetown) offers an absorbing account of the
legal struggles, led by Thurgood Marshall, to achieve civil fights
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 fulltime
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. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In Making Civil Rights Law, Tushnet provides a chronological narrative history of the legal struggle that preceded the political battles for civil rights, in the thirties, forties, and fifties, waged by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund led by Thurgood Marshall. Tushnet brings clarity to the legal reasoning that animated this `Constitutional revolution', showing how the slow development of doctrine and precedent reflected an overall legal strategy of Marshall and the NAACP.
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