Three Views of Thurgood Marshall
A champion of civil rights for more than 50 years and the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court (by Lyndon Johnson in 1967), Thurgood Marshall, who died last month at 84, was one of the most important and ground-breaking legal figures of this century. From his early work as counsel to the NAACP (he argued and won the 1954 landmark Supreme Court victory outlawing school segregation) through his 24-year record as a liberal Justice on the high court (where he spoke out for abortion rights and affirmative action and against capital punishment), Marshall always fought for the rights of the disenfranchised.
With varying degrees of sophistication, each of these excellent books analyzes the legacy of this son of a one-time Pullman porter and a Baltimore school teacher.
Readers with a serious interest in legal issues will appreciate THURGOOD MARSHALL: JUSTICE FOR ALL by Roger Goldman with David Gallen (Carroll & Graf, $24.95). Divided into three parts, this academic book offers essays about the man and the lawyer, an extensive analysis of his jurisprudence and, finally, actual legal opinions written by the Justice in his impeccably reasoned style.
THURGOOD MARSHALL: WARRIOR AT THE BAR, REBEL ON THE BENCH by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark (Birch Lane, $24.95) follows a traditional biographical format. Well-written, informative and lively, it is peppered with anecdotes demonstrating Marshall's irreverent humor. (Even in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court he would often greet Chief Justice Warren Burger with a zesty, "What's shaking, Chiefy baby?")
The most intimate account of Marshall's life, though, comes from syndicated columnist Carl T. Rowan. In his unauthorized biography, DREAM MAKERS, DREW BREAKERS: THE WORLD OF THIRGOOD MARSHALL (Little, Brown, $24.95), Rowan draws on 40 years of friendship with Marshall to paint a glowing portrait of the iconoclastic-Justice who retired in 1991. Frequently inserting himself into the narrative, Rowan manages to reconstruct not only Marshall's remarkable life but also the tumultuous, change-filled era in which they both grew up. Rowan piercingly recounts some of his friend's formative experiences. On NAACP business in downtown Baltimore, the young lawyer would have to hop a streetcar home when he had to use the bathroom because blacks were not allowed to use public facilities. Once, to his humiliation, he did not make it home in time. Marshall also describes hearing his father tell him about a former employer, a white Baltimore matron, who in his presence jestingly asked her dog whether it would rather be "dead or a nigger." When the dog rolled over with all fours in the air, Marshall's father, her butler, simply walked out and never came back. It was such painful experiences, Rowan argues, that galvanized Marshall the lawyer against discrimination of all kinds. Near the end Rowan caustically describes the nomination and confirmation of the conservative judge Clarence Thomas as a "fiasco" and plainly implies that the man Thomas replaced shared the opinion.
Darlene Clark Hine, editor
The Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, the first pitched battle of the modern civil rights movement, catapulted its general, Martin Luther King Jr., to national fame. But as this exceptional two-volume encyclopedia demonstrates, the unsung organizers, officers and (often literally) foot soldiers of the 381-day protest were working-class black women. As Erna Dungee Allen, financial secretary of the boycott committee, recalled, "They were the power behind the throne."
Reaching from the present back to colonial slave times, the encyclopedia boasts dozens of meticulously researched and highly absorbing thematic essays like "Montgomery Bus Boycott." With 604 full-scale biographical entries (and more than 450 photographs), the engagingly written 2,267-page work promises to become an invaluable school and library tool. Editor Hine, a professor of American history at Michigan Stale and author of several other reference works on black history, has lifted into sight stories of determination, dignity and daring that weave through every area of American life, and has given even the quietest its due. Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played the squeaky-voiced maid, Prissy, in Gone with the Wind, later gave up acting rather than accept demeaning roles and began working with minority students in Harlem. "I didn't mind being funny," she said, "but I didn't like being stupid." (Carlson, $195)
by Nelson George
George, a Village Voice columnist and former music editor at Billboard magazine, knows black pop culture inside out. This collection of profiles, essays, and reviews from 1980 to 1992 is an essential document and decoding tool for anyone attempting to understand the roots and flowering of rap and hip-hop, sports as ethnic expression and the both bleak and rich possibilities for African-Americans in commerce and contemporary life. He is particularly adept at tracing the complicated influence of '70s "blaxploitation" flicks on "hip-hop's romantic embrace of violence."
George's partisan tilting and hipster lexicon sometimes make his criticism seem impenetrable, but these are minor problems. His reporter's instincts, general open-mindedness and ability to convey the texture and essence of a scene usually prevail. As George writes, black style "evolved with blinding speed" during the last dozen years, but luckily George was there to catch it on the fly. (HarperCollins, $20)
by Arthur Flowers
True love is sometimes song and sometimes magic. In Flowers's second novel it is usually both, and a struggle as well. Lucas Bodeen, a traveling, often trifling Delta bluesman, plays piano. Conjure woman Melvira Dupree heals with roots and herbs. When they meet in Sweetwater, Ark., in 1918, Lucas dreams of composing an "immortal" blues to seal his musical legacy. Melvira is anxious to find the mother who abandoned her as a youngster and to learn why she left. Together they head for Memphis's teeming Beale Street—a wellspring of blues, a new music then called jass, hoodoo doctors and charlatans—a place that puts their fragile relationship to the test.
Ambitious and entertaining, Good Loving Blues explores the links between cultural heritage and racial consciousness. Told as a fable, it skillfully blends a wealth of African and African-American oral traditions (the text is chock-full of parables, folktales and toasts) with an engaging, uncluttered prose style. But Flowers's larger themes—the dues that precede artistic growth and the redemptive power of love—while keenly developed, too often burden his characters with more meaning than they can carry. Plot twists lead to colorful scenes that nonetheless do not reveal much about two interesting people who are easy to like. Still, Flowers, founder of the New Renaissance Writer's Guild in Harlem, has told an infectious fable. (Viking, $20)
by Samuel G. Freedman
Saint Paul Community Baptist Church ministers to one of the most blighted neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but out of ruins the church built a dynamic, prosperous and creative group of believers who have rejuvenated hundreds of discouraged souls and given pride back to the streets of East New York.
The remarkable hero of Freedman's brilliant chronicle of a year in the life of the church is the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, a 44-year-old dynamo of innovation, discipline and vulnerable humanity. After teaming up with other churches, Saint Paul was able to build several thousand units of low-income housing in an area that had been falling into rubble. Youngblood brings a similar spirit of action and persistence to the task of forging an inner-city theology that offers sympathy and understandable truth to men and women steeped in despair and danger. Freedman, a former New York Times reporter, spent 15 months observing the day-to-day drama of Saint Paul's life in the community, and he has told the complex, overlapping stories of this pastor and his flock in a clear, searching and moving style. (HarperCollins, $22.50)
>Carl T. Rowan
THE KICK IN MARSHALL'S BEEF STEW
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST ROWAN FIRST met Thurgood Marshall in 1953, when Marshall was in Minneapolis to give a speech on behalf of the NAACP Rowan, a young local reporter, and the hotshot civil rights lawyer hit it off immediately. "In those days you could count the blacks working for a daily newspaper on one hand," says Rowan, 67. "I was a conduit to millions of Americans, a conduit of trust for him." Rowan was often asked to sit in on the NAACP's private meetings, such as the preparations for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. And when Rowan visited Manhattan, he would often be invited to dinner at Cissy and Thurgood Marshall's home, with Thurgood proudly preparing his crab soup or "the best beef stew I ever tasted." The stew's secret ingredient: "More bourbon than you'd drink in a month!"
For all his irascible humor, Rowan says, "in the courtroom Marshall was an awesome figure; his rhetoric was amazing. Yet he knew the difference between the rhetoric of black manhood and the deeds of black manhood, and he dealt almost exclusively in deeds. This shows in the grueling travel he did in those segregationist days, working for next to nothing for the NAACR He was the essence of black pride, to the point of never admitting that anyone had beaten him or gotten him down. But in the continuing argument over whether blacks should go (or integration or separatism, to his credit he always said, I am going to be a part of this entire society and use the Constitution the way Moses used the tablets of stone and open up new opportunities.' "
- Contributors:
- Jill Rachlin,
- Eric Levin,
- Hal Espen,
- V.R. Peterson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
