Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice - Hardcover

Gibson, Larry S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616145714 ISBN 13: 9781616145712

Publisher: Prometheus, 2012

Synopsis

Like the movie Marshall, this book--theonly biography of Thurgood Marshall to be endorsed by Marshall's immediate family--focuses on his early civil rights struggles andsuccesses beforeBrown v. Board of Education.Thurgood Marshall was the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century. He transformed the nation's legal landscape by challenging the racial segregation that had relegated millions to second-class citizenship. He won twenty-nine of thirty-three cases before the United States Supreme Court, was a federal appeals court judge, served as the US solicitor general, and, for twenty-four years, sat on the Supreme Court. Marshall is best known for achievements after he relocated to New York in 1936 to work for the NAACP. But Marshall's personality, attitudes, priorities, and work habits had crystallized during earlier years in Maryland. This work is the first close examination of the formative period in Marshall's life. As the author shows, Thurgood Marshall was a fascinating man of contrasts. He fought for racial justice without becoming a racist. Simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic, Marshall was a passionate advocate, yet he maintained friendly relationships with his opponents. Young Thurgood reveals how Marshall's distinctive traits were molded by events, people, and circumstances early in his life. Professor Gibson presents fresh information about Marshall's family, youth, and education. He describes Marshall's key mentors, the special impact of his high school and college competitive debating, his struggles to establish a law practice during the Great Depression, and his first civil rights cases. The author sheds new light on the NAACP and its first lawsuits in the campaign that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. He also corrects some of the often-repeated stories about Marshall that are inaccurate.The only biography of Thurgood Marshall to be endorsed by Marshall's immediate family, Young Thurgood is an exhaustively researched and engagingly written work that everyone interested in law, civil rights, American history, and biography will want to read.

About this title

About the Author:

Larry S. Gibson (Baltimore, MD) is a professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in Baltimore, Maryland, where he has been on the faculty for thirty-seven years. He is also a practicing lawyer with the firm of Shapiro, Sher, Guinot, and Sandler. Among his many accomplishments was legislation that renamed Maryland's major airport, the Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

FOREWORD by Thurgood Marshall Jr.
 

Many works about my father have been assembled, ranging from formal works of scholarship to popular biographical profiles to children’s books, movies, and documentaries. With this detailed and carefully crafted volume, Professor Larry S. Gibson has crafted a unique and engrossing portrait.

The photograph that graces the cover speaks volumes about the content of this book. The tall, striking, and confident figure is unmistakable, yet it is an image of Thurgood Marshall that is rarely if ever seen, even by those who have studied his life or who knew him well.

The cover photo is just one of countless treasures from my father’s early and formative years that Professor Gibson has unearthed. Through the rich collection of childhood anecdotes; the insights into the colorful assemblage of relatives, mentors, and legal clients who shaped my father’s development; and the recounting of the challenges and opportunities my father encountered in his local community and throughout our country, this book weaves together the events that formed the foundation for my father’s career.

Professor Gibson’s attention to detail and thorough research is apparent throughout this book. His sleuthing has led him to courthouses and clerk’s offices as well as to professional and personal correspondence in many locales. That trove of information has enabled him to understand the ways in which my father applied his talent and skill and faced his own personal challenges.

Readers will see in this book the origins of my father’s penchant for storytelling and his desire to act as an advocate for fairness on behalf of those who are marginalized in American society. Professor Gibson sets the stage with a gritty sense of the tone of the times when my father was born in Baltimore, which at that time was a segregated city not far from communities that often tilted toward vigilante justice instead of the rule of law. This book brings to life the array of relatives and friends who surrounded my father as he grew up and demonstrates how an early focus on academics and debate honed his skills and determined his interests for alifetime. With classmates like Cab Calloway and Langston Hughes, there was little room in his social circle for shrinking violets or backbenchers. And there was plenty of room for creative fun and mischief. Law school brought those experiences together in new ways and gave my father the tools he needed to live a life of consequence.

This book also details the breadth of my father’s legal work. By the time my father began arguing cases before the US Supreme Court, he had already handled a diverse array of client interests that included divorces, simple assaults, and capital murder cases. Here, too, are chronicled my father’s early involvement with politics, the civil rights movement, and the NAACP, as well as his early efforts to bring equality to education, voting, housing, and the fabric of American society. Young Thurgood provides that information in an enjoyable way, even to the point of letting us know about the kind of employment my father found after the workday was over to make ends meet.

Professor Gibson has given us a book that contains many new factsand insights and presents them in compelling prose. The result is as entertainingas it is unique, poignant, and informative.

Thurgood Marshall Jr.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1616145714
• ISBN 13: 9781616145712
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 413