Julius Chambers Rosen, Richard A; Mosnier, Joseph
12/2016
eBook
Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936-2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation's leading African American ...civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark.In this biography, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect the details of Chambers's life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel's lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, they reveal Chambers's singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.
"The history of the black lawyer in South Carolina," writes W. Lewis Burke, "is one of the most significant untold stories of the long and troubled struggle for equal rights in the state." Beginning ...in Reconstruction and continuing to the modern civil rights era, 168 black lawyers were admitted to the South Carolina bar.All for Civil Rightsis the first book-length study devoted to those lawyers' struggles and achievements in the state that had the largest black population in the country, by percentage, until 1930-and that was a majority black state through 1920.
Examining court processes, trials, and life stories of the lawyers, Burke offers a comprehensive analysis of black lawyers' engagement with the legal system. Some of that study is set in the courts and legislative halls, for the South Carolina bar once had the highest percentage of black lawyers of any southern state, and South Carolina was one of only two states to ever have a black majority legislature. However, Burke also tells who these lawyers were (some were former slaves, while others had backgrounds in the church, the military, or journalism); where they came from (nonnatives came from as close as Georgia and as far away as Barbados); and how they were educated, largely through apprenticeship.
Burke argues forcefully that from the earliest days after the Civil War to the heyday of the modern civil rights movement, the story of the black lawyer in South Carolina is the story of the civil rights lawyer in the Deep South. AlthoughAll for Civil Rightsfocuses specifically on South Carolinians, its argument about the legal shift in black personhood from the slave era to the 1960s resonates throughout the South.
Representing the Race tells the story of African American lawyers who, during the era of segregation, confronted a tension between their racial and professional identities. Their untold stories pose ...the unsettling question: What, ultimately, does it mean to "represent" a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?.
Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy (1916-2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In ...the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie M. Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist. Rather than simply reacting to the predominantly white feminist movement, Kennedy brought the lessons of Black Power to white feminism and built bridges in the struggles against racism and sexism. Randolph narrates Kennedy's progressive upbringing, her pathbreaking graduation from Columbia Law School, and her long career as a media-savvy activist, showing how Kennedy rose to founding roles in organizations such as the National Black Feminist Organization and the National Organization for Women, allying herself with both white and black activists such as Adam Clayton Powell, H. Rap Brown, Betty Friedan, and Shirley Chisholm.Making use of an extensive and previously uncollected archive, Randolph demonstrates profound connections within the histories of the new left, civil rights, Black Power, and feminism, showing that black feminism was pivotal in shaping postwar U.S. liberation movements.
Jane Crow Rosenberg, Rosalind
2017, 2017-03-22
eBook
Euro-African-American activist Pauli Murray was a feminist lawyer, who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements. Born in 1910 and identified as female, she believed ...from childhood she was male. Before there was a social movement to support transgender identity, she devised attacks on all arbitrary distinctions, greatly expanding the idea of equality in the process.
While bus boycotts, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience were the engine of the civil rights movement, the law was a primary context. Lawyers played a key role amid profound social ...upheavals, and the twenty-six contributors to this volume reveal what it was like to be a southern civil rights lawyer in this era.
These eyewitness accounts provide unique windows onto the most dramatic moments in civil rights history, illuminating the legal fights that heralded the 1965 Selma March, the first civil judgment against the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of ballot access for blacks in Alabama, and the 1968 Democratic Convention. White and black, male and female, northern- and southern-born, these lawyers discuss both the abuses they endured and the barriers they broke as they helped shape a critical chapter of American history.
