Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1956-1961 [Paperback]

Mark V. Tushnet (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195104684 | ISBN-13: 978-0195104684 | Publication Date: February 15, 1996

From the 1930s to the early 1960s civil rights law was made primarily through constitutional litigation. Before Rosa Parks could ignite a Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Supreme Court had to strike down the Alabama law which made segregated bus service required by law; before Martin Luther King could march on Selma to register voters, the Supreme Court had to find unconstitutional the Southern Democratic Party's exclusion of African-Americans; and before the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court had to strike down the laws allowing for the segregation of public graduate schools, colleges, high schools, and grade schools.
Making Civil Rights Law provides a chronological narrative history of the legal struggle, led by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that preceded the political battles for civil rights. Drawing on interviews with Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers, as well as new information about the private deliberations of the Supreme Court, Tushnet tells the dramatic story of how the NAACP Legal Defense Fund led the Court to use the Constitution as an instrument of liberty and justice for all African-Americans. He also offers new insights into how the justices argued among themselves about the historic changes they were to make in American society.
Making Civil Rights Law provides an overall picture of the forces involved in civil rights litigation, bringing clarity to the legal reasoning that animated this "Constitutional revolution", and showing how the slow development of doctrine and precedent reflected the overall legal strategy of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though this book covers some of the same ground as more popular histories like Richard Kluger's Simple Justice , Tushnet offers a more detailed and nuanced look at the workings of NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers and the internal arguments at the Supreme Court. A professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Tushnet draws on a wealth of materials--including newly available documents and interviews with Marshall himself--to provide a substantial, if dry, account for students and scholars. He explains how Marshall and his team at the NAACP moved from voting rights cases to education cases, and how sociological material crucial to Brown v . Board of Education was employed in restrictive covenant cases. He also provides a thorough account of the ideas and arguments of the individual justices who heard Brown , including the decision to reach the much criticized formulation of desegregation at "all deliberate speed." Marshall, observes Tushnet with judicious admiration, "constructed the job of civil rights lawyer" beginning in 1938, but by the late 1950s, he notes, the growth of a larger movement complete with demonstrations and boycotts made litigation less crucial to the civil rights movement.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

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. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195104684
• ISBN-13: 978-0195104684
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,345,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( M ) > Marshall, Thurgood

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very informative but dry, November 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (Hardcover)

This book is a decisive history of Thurgood Marshall's actions and the effects that he had on the civil rights of African-Americans while he worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His successes, failures, and discussions of his effects make it a very informative book. It is quite obvious that the author spent a great amount of time researching his topic of choice. The book is absolutely full of quotes from people of the time and very detailed factual accounts of events. Unfortunately, the content is not written in an extremely appealing matter. It tends to drone on and on about various cases and actions which have no major significance in history nor in the life of Marshall. If you can read through the dry spots, though, its a great book. You can really get a felling for the social climate of the era as well as the thoughts and feelings of Marshall himself. As a research tool, this was definitely the most valuable book I came across. If I was rating this book based on its information it would be an easy five. Ultimately, it is a good book for pleasure reading but not the best. I would have to say that Juan Williams' Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary is the best. If you are interested in Marshall's career, though, you want to look at Tushnet's other book Making Constitutional Law : Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991.