Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall - Hardcover

Long, Michael G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006198518X ISBN 13: 9780061985188

Publisher: Amistad, 2011

Synopsis

“[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.

About this title

About the Author

Michael G. Long is an associate professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College and is the author or editor of several books on civil rights, religion, and politics in mid-century America, including First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson and Billy Graham and the Beloved Community: America's Evangelist and the Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta and resides in Highland Park, Pennsylvania.

From the Back Cover

Collected here together for the first time are the selected letters of one of the most influential and important activists in the American civil rights movement—the brilliant legal mind and foot soldier for justice, Thurgood Marshall.

For twenty years prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a rebellious young attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Thurgood Marshall, struggled tirelessly to combat racism, discrimination, and segregation in schools, transportation, the military, businesses, and voting booths across America. This collection of letters, compiled and edited by Michael G. Long, and written by Thurgood Marshall during his tenure with the NAACP—long before he became a Supreme Court justice—reveals this remarkable man’s extraordinary intellectual development and invaluable contributions to the civil rights movement, highlighting his relentless work in helping secure equality and justice for all Americans.

Long traces Marshall’s correspondence with the most powerful leaders of his day—J. Edgar Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, NAACP leader Walter White, and many others—cataloging how Marshall was able to accomplish in the courts what Martin Luther King Jr. would work to do from the pulpit and on the streets. Through these letters, we discover a startling new portrait of Marshall and gain a deeper understanding of the influences that spurred his unrelenting advocacy for society’s most vulnerable. A window into the history and radical roots of the modern civil rights movement, these letters illuminate the strides that one man made, and the distance that still yawns between his goals and present-day reality.

Reviews

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. (Jan.)Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the
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Edition details

• Publisher: Amistad
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006198518X
• ISBN 13: 9780061985188
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448