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This chapter details events following Marshall's arrival in Kenya in 1963. It had been three years since Marshall had last been to the country. In early 1960, independence had been a demand. Now it was an inevitability, with ceremonies scheduled for December. Jomo Kenyatta, still in detention in 1960, his influence feared by the British and Americans, had instead emerged as a moderating voice after his release in 1961. He had carried the Kenya African National Union (KANU) to power, and was now prime minister during the colony's short period of self-rule. As for Marshall, bruising Court of Appeals confirmation hearings were now behind him. The civil rights lawyer had settled into life on the court.

This chapter details events that occurred in summer 1966, which was marked by racial tensions and riots in cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Throughout his career, Marshall had been a consistent critic of police misconduct and racism. Then, in 1965 he was named solicitor general, one of the nation's top legal officials. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who seemed genuinely committed to civil rights, called on him for advice, both about civil rights proposals and about how to stem the violence. But there was another dimension to Marshall's role. He had come to believe that law structured the lives and opportunities of African Americans and that it was through legal reform that real change would come. The crowds in the streets rejected this vision. And the political climate had changed, in part a negative reaction to urban violence, undermining the political context for new civil rights legislation.

This chapter details events following Marshall's arrival in Africa in 1960. As an African American activist traveling to a rigidly controlled colony with the objective of aiding the nationalists, he was fortunate to get a visa. Once in Kenya, he would face colonial government restrictions on his activities. Nonetheless, going to Kenya gave Marshall a chance to step outside of it all, to make new connections. Although it might seem strange for an American lawyer with no previous experience with African law to serve as an expert at Kenya's constitutional deliberations, Marshall had something that an “underdeveloped” region like Kenya was thought to need: expertise in a “developed” legal system.

This chapter details Marshall's role as British officials and Africans began crafting a rule of law to guide Kenya's future. As an American, Marshall might seem like an intruder in a conversation, in essence, between British ruler and subject. But his presence was a marker of an era. His nation had thrown off British rule, an example that inspired the new generation. As rights became a central issue, Marshall found himself front and center. He was tasked with drafting a bill of rights. This was not a neat and tidy task, confined to the pristine world of legal analysis. And the document would not inscribe rights that would last forever. Instead, it was bricks-and-mortar work, the laying of a political foundation. The Bill of Rights was most importantly a commitment on the part of the parties to each other, a commitment to politics. To craft rights was to help build a nation.

This chapter captures the NAACP’s efforts to coordinate a nationwide campaign against restrictive covenants. It assesses the Association’s evolving strategies and coalition-building within the larger intellectual currents of the 1940s as a way to understand the dynamics of reform litigation at the national level. Building upon the organization’s rapid growth and a unique moment in American intellectual and political development, the NAACP legal team experimented in new ways with the use of a “Brandeis brief” that deployed social scientific arguments against racial discrimination and drew heavily upon the emergence of scientific antiracism. Simultaneously, the chapter explores how Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues at the NAACP cultivated a powerful network of sympathetic organizations that helped to bolster their campaign by developing the largest group of amici curiae the Supreme Court had ever seen.

This chapter details the events leading up to Thurgood Marshall's adventure in Kenya. Marshall was a civil rights legend in America when he began his African journey. It became one of the great adventures of his life. He followed a path well worn by others, but his journey would be different. He would not travel by riverboat into the Congo, as had American missionaries, or sail along the West African coast as did the poet Langston Hughes. Marshall flew first to Monrovia, then on to Nairobi. He was in search not of souls to save or stories to tell. Instead, Africa was on the cusp of revolution and he had come to help.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which namely is to follow Thurgood Marshall from his civil rights practice in New York to Kenya under colonial rule. This story cannot be found in traditional sources for an American biography. The Bill of Rights that Marshall wrote for Kenya, for example, is not in any American archive, but in British colonial records in England. Marshall's African journey is not a triumphalist story of American law solving all problems. The legal ideas Marshall offered often were not American ones. And legal solutions did not create a legal edifice that would last for all time. Instead law could serve as a way station, giving political actors a way to talk to each other, a way to keep working together when things were hard.

This chapter details events following Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court. As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall worked on the problem of race in America. His life's focus became undoing the constitutional embodiment of Jim Crow, surely one of the impediments to equality. However, moving the nation toward a fuller vision of racial justice in the 1960s required other tools than those Marshall possessed, and this required a deeper commitment from a broader political coalition. What had once seemed possible was out of reach by 1968. A nation torn apart over war and divided over domestic politics was not to be united around the vision of its 1960s leaders. It was a cruel irony that in shining a light on the cities, the Kerner Commission Report seemed a reverse echo of Brown: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

This chapter examines several court decisions pertaining to distributive justice and the school system in order to present a fuller portrait of the “Milliken” and “Marshallian” theories of democracy. It discusses two types of cases in particular. First, the chapter interprets cases involving race, especially segregation and voluntary pupil assignment, as confrontations between these two theories of democracy. Second, it provides a somewhat briefer treatment to the cases that arise out of the challenges to the states' public school funding schemes on behalf of low-income students.

The Sweatt v. Painter case gained Heman Sweatt a place in the University of Texas Law School; more important was the first victory for the LDF campaign against segregation, abandoning the earlier attempt to make separate but equal truly equal. It also pioneered the use of historical and sociological evidence that separate but equal could never be equal.

The years immediately following World War II proved to be fruitful for the NAACP. Its membership increased significantly, and its litigation campaign was securing important precedents with each victory in the courtroom under the direction of Thurgood Marshall. For Wilkins, however, the late 1940s and early 1950s proved to be a period of frustration. Although Walter White’s bouts of ill health, scandals over his personal affairs, and his increasing distance from the NAACP were causes of concern, he continued to dominate the Association, leaving Wilkins with administrative responsibility but little autonomy. There were encouraging signs from the White House that the fight for freedom might have a powerful ally with President Truman’s executive order to desegregate the armed forces, and the succession of African and Asian countries that freed themselves from colonial oppression also gave cause for cheer. Unfortunately, the NAACP’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954 should have dealt a stunning and decisive blow against segregation, but instead it unleashed a wave of white resistance, the extent of which the NAACP had underestimated. It was up to Wilkins to meet this challenge when Walter White died suddenly in 1955 and Wilkins was named Secretary of the NAACP.

The story of Brown v. Board of Education told from both sides: anti- and pro-segregation. The story begins with Briggs v. Elliott and continues through to the decision in Brown II. The chapter follows the briefs, oral arguments, and decisions in both cases, featuring the arguments of Thurgood Marshall and John W. Davis, and the opinions of John Parker, J. Waties Waring, and Earl Warren.

This chapter analyzes key legal battles over golf integration after World War II and the role played by the NAACP and other national civil rights organizations in waging that fight, including leading litigators Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall. It explores the ongoing battles to desegregate America’s municipal courses in the 1950s and 1960s—such as the most important legal case, Holmes v. Atlanta—and emphasizes how national black organizations debated the game’s value and whether to support legal challenges to segregated golf in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Here the narrative transitions from stories of individuals and local groups who took up the game to one of national organizations and institutions sustaining black players and challenging racial discrimination in golf, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet still there was no consensus on the game’s social significance or its value to African Americans. Just as local communities failed to rectify the tension between black golfers as symbolic of integration and economic promise—or symbolic of elitism and racial tokenism—so too did national organizations like the UGA and NAACP fail to reach a consensus on the game’s larger meanings.

Chapter 3 describes Chambers's two years in New York 1962-1964, the first at Columbia Law School and the second as the first-ever civil rights intern at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund ("LDF"). Earlier the LDF, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, pioneered systematic strategic litigation for social change and led the legal campaign that culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which signalled the beginning of the end of state-sponsored apartheid in the American South. In 1963 LDF director-counsel Jack Greenberg selected Chambers as the first intern for a new program designed to offer prospective civil rights attorneys front-line experience at LDF headquarters in New York City plus three years of subsequent modest funding to support the establishment of new Southern law practices as allies in civil rights litigation. Chambers found the year at LDF exhilarating. Working with LDF's highly-motivated and exceptionally talented staff attorneys, Chambers traveled the South to assist with LDF cases, gaining experience and a clear vision of his professional future.

This chapter describes how the black citizens of Forrest County, Mississippi, were unable to register to vote while Luther M. Cox, Jr. was registrar. In April 1952, nine black men and women who were refused registration prepared affidavits about their experiences, which were then sent to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The nine affidavits reached the New York desk of NAACP special counsel Thurgood Marshall, who sent them to President Truman’s last chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, requesting “an immediate investigation of these complaints and the necessary definitive action to insure the protection of the right of qualified Negro electors to register and vote in the State of Mississippi.” Herbert Brownell, President Eisenhower’s first attorney general, submitted one of the affidavits to Congress in advocating for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

A discussion of adversarial lawyering and how it played out in the civil rights struggle. The role of judges in the struggle, and the reticence of the academic legal community. The shifting burden of proof, with a focus on Jim Crow, the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and public interest lawyering.

This chapter discusses the legal battles involving the University of Texas School of Law and its affirmative action program. In the wake of its success in 1944 in the all-white primary case, Smith v. Allwright, the Texas NAACP called for the integration of Texas's flagship university in Austin. Some months later Thurgood Marshall wrote a letter to Austin's only African American lawyer asking for information about how to apply to the UT School of Law. The chapter examines the Supreme Court case of Heman Marion Sweatt that produced a major stepping-stone toward Brown v. Board of Education, along with another case involving UT's undergraduate admissions that reaffirmed a state's right to implement affirmative action policies. In particular, it analyzes McLaurin v. Regents and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, along with the Texas legislature's response to Hopwood v. Texas in the form of the “10% rule.”

This book concludes with a discussion of the Western Union telegram Charles Scott received at his Topeka law office from lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who was in New York. Marshall wrote, “Have just received information on the latest action Topeka School Board completely abolishing all segregation September this year. Please advise.” The telegram noted Marshall's continued concern for the enforcement of the Brown case that he and Scott had successfully helped to argue a year earlier. It was the 1954 decision that made segregation in public places unconstitutional, but Charles Scott, along with his brother John Scott and colleague Charles Bledsoe, had first argued the Brown case in the federal district court in Topeka in 1951, when Charles was a member of the law firm of his father, Elisha Scott, a former student of the Tennesseetown Kindergarten.

This chapter argues that segregation generated organized opposition from African Americans and a small group of whites that challenged the system. Segregation was rigid, capricious, and designed to demonstrate white power. While it kept most blacks in menial positions, a small black middle class emerged that produced leaders who attacked Jim Crow. The organization leading the charge was the NAACP, which developed publicity, lobbying, and litigation campaigns. The effort gained steam in the 1930s, as a cadre of black lawyers challenged segregated education, the CIO and the Communist party championed civil rights, and the New Deal gave blacks a voice in federal policy. It further accelerated during World War II as the federal government challenged workplace discrimination, membership in civil rights organizations swelled, black veterans demanded their rights, and the Supreme Court became more aggressive on civil rights.