Representing the race : the creation of the civil rights lawyer / by Kenneth W. Mack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mack, Kenneth Walter, 1964-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Alexander, Raymond Pace, 1898-1974.

Alexander, Raymond Pace.

Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell, 1898-1989.

Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell.

African American lawyers--Biography.

African American lawyers.

Cause lawyers.

United States.

Cause lawyers--United States--Biography.

Civil rights movements--United States--History--20th century.

Civil rights movements.

History.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

330 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Summary:

This is a collective biography of African American civil rights lawyers practicing in the era of segregation that centers its narrative on the dilemma the lawyers faced between the conflicting and unsettled demands of both minority and majority groups that they serve as "representatives" of the race, demands that simultaneously pushed these lawyers to act as atypical achievers unlike the masses, working almost exclusively under the professional gaze of white observers, as well as authentic products of the black masses at the same time, a phenomenon that Mack (law, Harvard Law School) argues is still a key dynamic of American race relations today (such as in debates about how authentically "black" was the life experience of President Barack Obama). Mack's discussion examines the careers of such figures as Thurgood Marshall, who successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and later went on to become a Supreme Court Justice himself; Loren Miller, who learned of his black roots in college and went on to become a Marxist critic of his fellow black lawyers and a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, whose experiences as a black woman in the courts led to her playing a key role in the articulation of sex discrimination as a category of law. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Contents:

The idea of the representative Negro

Racial identity and the marketplace for lawyers

The role of the courtroom in an era of segregation

A shifting racial identity in a southern courtroom

Young Thurgood Marshall joins the brotherhood of the bar

A woman in a fraternity of lawyers

Things fall apart

The strange journey of Loren Miller

Pauli Murray searches for self, and finds a new idea

A lawyer as the face of integration in postwar America.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674046870

0674046870

OCLC:

756377488