For the past four decades, the story of Thurgood Marshall, the African American civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education in the early 1950s and then became the Supreme Court’s first black justice in 1967, has encapsulated our understanding of how racial segregation was vanquished from American life. Richard Kluger’s “Simple Justice” (1976), one of the finest nonfiction books ever written, memorialized that saga with a factual sweep and emotional power that few works of history ever capture.
Now Kenneth W. Mack, a Harvard law professor, fundamentally supplants that heroic account of the segregation-to-integration struggle that Marshall and others “planted as the core narrative of American race relations” by means of “a collective biography” of the African American lawyers — Marshall included — whose “intersecting lives” encompassed the legal assault on racial discrimination from the late 19th century through the 1950s.
(Harvard Univ.) - ‘Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer’ by Kenneth W. Mack
“The usual story of black civil rights lawyers in American history is that these lawyers represented the interests of a unified minority group that wanted to be integrated into the core fabric of the nation,” Mack notes at the outset. But the far more complicated truth, he argues in this richly compelling and impressively astute volume, is that success in the courtroom required black lawyers to adopt “a studied racial ambiguity” whereby “the authentic representative of African Americans . . . seemed as much like his white colleagues as possible” and “as unlike the rest of his race as possible.”
Mack begins his account with the life of John Mercer Langston, a contemporary of Frederick Douglass who became the first dean of Howard University’s law school but whom history has largely forgotten. For Langston, and then for Philadelphia’s Raymond Pace Alexander, black America’s most successful lawyer of the 1930s and ’40s, “to be an authentic representative of your race — in the eyes of blacks and whites alike — was often to be seen, as much as possible, as a white man.” Alexander was an inspirational figure both for Marshall and for Marshall’s mentor, Charles H. Houston, but Mack makes relatively little of how consistently those pre-1950s attorneys boasted far lighter complexions than most other African Americans. “Marshall’s ability to perform like a white man in court” was an essential skill, but the fact that Langston, Alexander, Houston and Marshall could not be color-categorized as black certainly aided their acceptance by white legal professionals.
One of Mack’s most original and insightful themes is his argument that African American lawyers saw themselves as “members of a fraternity that crossed the color line” and that “cross-racial professional norms” allowed “black men to cross over into the white world” inside courtrooms both North and South. He musters a surprising amount of first-hand, contemporaneous evidence to support that argument, none more powerful than that from the 1933 capital murder trial of George Crawford in Loudoun County where Houston avoided a universally anticipated death sentence and won astonishing acceptance from white prosecutors and jurists.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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