THURGOOD MARSHALL: American RevoIutionary

THURGOOD MARSHALL: American Revolutionary. By Juan Williams. Times Books. 459 pp. $27.50

In the latest addition to the substantial literature on the first black Supreme Court justice, Williams charts Marshall’s transformation from a child of rather humble but middleclass origins (his mother was a schoolteacher, his father a steward at an all-white yacht club) into an "American Revolutionary" honored by blacks as "Mr. Civil Rights." Spurred on by his mother’s unwavering support and reoriented (temporarily) from parties to studies in college, Marshall found his life’s focus under a harddriving Howard Law School mentor, Charles Houston. Houston drew Marshall into NAACP work in the deep South, immersing him in the fight against the white primary, lynching, segregated transportation, restrictive covenants, and school segregation. It all culminated in Marshall’s triumph in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the Supreme Court unanimously declared that segregated public education violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Marshall was rewarded for his accomplishments, first with a federal judgeship in 1961 and then with a place on the Supreme Court in 1967.

As the years passed, though, Marshall became increasingly bitter. He lamented the civil rights movement’s shift from law to other tools of reform. He bridled not only at Black Power militants but, privately, at the nonviolent protests of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well. Later, the growing conservatism of the Court and the White House seemed to seal Marshall’s view that the country had breached the promise of the civil rights revolution.

Williams provides a lively and readable introduction to the justice’s personal and professional life, drawing on Marshall’s correspondence, other primary documents, and extensive interviews (but, surprisingly, neglecting the existing literature on Marshall and the civil rights movement). A Washington Post journalist and the author of the book companion to the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, Williams proceeds case by case through Marshall’s extensive legal career, offering helpful summaries but little sustained analysis of the justice’s brand of civil rights activism.

In the final chapter, the author suggests that Marshall’s approach rested on a belief that individual rights are paramount. How did this philosophy affect other aspects of Marshall’s life, such as his personal indulgence or his distaste for King? Williams never says. His thin rendering of Marshall’s beliefs also fails to account for the justice’s descent into bitter isolation, given his legendary successes. While Williams depicts Marshall as a straightforward believer in individual rights, the evidence points toward some more strained individualistic ethos that emphasized the personal dimension of offense and grievance, individual rights and redress, law as the only solution to social wrongs, and the autonomous nature of human achievement—not all of which are easily reconciled with the collectivist underpinnings of civil rights and social life more generally. The author provides the details of Justice Marshall’s life without fully reflecting on its ultimate meaning and trajectory.

—Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn