Showdown
Thurgood Marshall overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine, established integrated schools, and not only battled for but also made human rights and dignity unalienable in the courts and on the streets. Wil Haygood, the award-winning author of The Butler, has written a startling new biography that goes beyond the emotional effect of his best-selling book to explore the life and career of one of the most influential legal brains of the last century.
Haygood creates a provocative and moving look at Marshall's life as well as the politicians, lawyers, activists, and others who shaped—or desperately tried to stop—the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, using the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice: President Lyndon B. Johnson; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., whose scandals almost lost Marshall a Supreme Court seat; Harry and Harriette Moore, Florida NAACP workers murdered by the KKK; Justice J. Waties Waring, a racial lawyer from South Carolina who became such a civil rights advocate after being appointed to the federal court that he was compelled to quit the South; Senators John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy; Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a renowned racist who had a secret black mistress and child; North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, who tried to use his Constitutional expertise to block Marshall's appointment; Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who stated that segregation was "the law of nature, the law of God"; Senators James Eastland of Mississippi, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, who authored a prize-winning school essay declaring that Teddy Roosevelt had undermined the integrity of the presidency when Roosevelt welcomed Booker T. Washington to supper at the White House when he was a youngster; and many more.
Thurgood Marshall's continuing effect on our nation's racial politics cannot be overstated, as this energising book demonstrates.
