The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America - Softcover

Barrett, Paul M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452278597 ISBN 13: 9780452278592

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2000

Synopsis

Larry Mungin spent his life preparing to succeed in the white world. He looked away from racial inequality and hostility, believing he'd make it if he worked hard and played by the rules. He rose from a Queens housing project to Harvard Law School, and went on to practice law at major corporate firms. But just at the point when he thought he'd make it, when he should have been considered for partnership, he sued his employer for racial discrimination. The firm claimed it went out of its way to help Larry because of his race, while Larry thought he'd been treated unfairly. Was Larry a victim of racial discrimination, or just another victim of the typical dog-eat-dog corporate law culture? A thought-provoking courtroom drama with the fast pace of a commercial novel, The Good Black asks readers to rethink their ideas about race and is a fascinating look at the inner workings of the legal profession.

About this title

Review:

Here is the quintessential American success story: a young African American boy from an inner-city neighborhood makes good and goes to Harvard Law School, then on to a promising career in a prestigious law firm. In Paul M. Barrett's unsettling The Good Black, however, the rags-to-riches formula goes terribly awry. Barrett's subject is his former college roommate, Lawrence Mungin. As a child in the all-black Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Mungin had learned at his mother's knee that he was "a human being first, an American second, and a black third." Hard work and good grades got him into Harvard. After several years as an associate at law firms in Atlanta and Houston, Mungin signed on with the Washington, D.C., firm of Katten Muchin & Zavis, hoping at last to achieve his dream of full partnership. What he got instead was the end of his career.

The facts of what happened to Lawrence Mungin are indisputable: demeaning work, insulting treatment, zero advancement; what is in question is why he was treated in such a way. When Mungin took his complaint to court, he claimed racial discrimination; Katten Muchin & Zavis didn't deny their mistreatment but insisted that, far from being racially motivated, it was simply the way the firm treated all its employees. Barrett, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, chronicles Mungin's life, his lawsuit, and the bitter aftermath of the trial in a book that raises more questions than it answers--questions about the American way of doing business that should trouble every American, white or black.

From the Back Cover:

In this eloquent and suspenseful work of nonfiction, Paul M. Barrett goes into the minefields of corporate America and inside our legal system to tell the story of one man's journey across racial lines.

Taught to believe that he was "a human being first, an American second, and a black third", Larry Mungin grew up with the credo that if you played by the rules, you'd succeed. His pursuit of the American Dream took him from a Queens housing project to Harvard Law School to the Washington, D.C., office of Katten Muchin & Zavis, a blue-chip Chicago law firm, where he worked toward achieving a coveted partnership.

It didn't happen. In the fall of 1994, brushed off by senior partners who weren't even considering him for partnership, Mungin hired an upstart black firm to sue his employer. Katten Muchin & Zavis retaliated by mounting the best defense money could buy. The jury's verdict made headlines from coast to coast; the final ruling on appeal was even more startling.

Was Mungin a victim of racial discrimination, business-as-usual mismanagement, or changes in the legal marketplace? At once a gripping courtroom drama and an intimate account of the forces that drove one man to risk everything for his ideals, The Good Black challenges us to make up our own minds and to see in Larry Mungin's story the deeper, far-reaching implications of racial discrimination in our time.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0452278597
• ISBN 13: 9780452278592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320