Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights LawyerPosted in Articles, Biography, Books, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2012-06-01 01:54Z by Steven |
Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer
Harvard University Press
April 2012
352 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches; 20 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674046870
Kenneth W. Mack, Professor of Law
Harvard University
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Representing the Race tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they were expected to be “authentic”—that is, in sympathy with the black masses. This conundrum, as Kenneth W. Mack shows, continues to reverberate through American politics today.
Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent whites that he was—as nearly as possible—one of them. But he also introduces a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to “represent” a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. The Idea of the Representative Negro
- 2. Racial Identity and the Marketplace for Lawyers
- 3. The Role of the Courtroom in an Era of Segregation
- 4. A Shifting Racial Identity in a Southern Courtroom
- 5. Young Thurgood Marshall Joins the Brotherhood of the Bar
- 6. A Woman in a Fraternity of Lawyers
- 7. Things Fall Apart
- 8. The Strange Journey of Loren Miller
- 9. The Trials of Pauli Murray
- 10. A Lawyer as the Face of Integration in Postwar America
- Conclusion: Race and Representation in a New Century
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index