The first African-American to serve on the United States Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall was the only justice who experienced segregation in the back of the bus.
From his early life in Baltimore at the turn of the century to his retirement in June 1991 after twenty-four years of service on the Court, Marshall was a feisty curmudgeon with a passion and fury, a pioneering lawyer who became America's most prominent civil rights attorney, winning twenty-nine of the thirty-two civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His crowning legal achievement was the decision reached in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had condoned racially segregated schools throughout the country.
Named to the Supreme Court in 1967, he became one of the great liberal justices, and served with Chief Justice Earl Warren. More than a story of a colorful man, this insightful biography examines Marshall's judicial views on some of the most sensitive and politically charged social issues of our time — abortion, capital punishment, women's rights and affirmative action. The book also provides intriguing accounts of:
* The "devil's pact" President John F. Kennedy made with Mississippi Senator James Eastland to assure Marshall's appointment to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
* His early disagreement with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about "using children to do men's work" in southern demonstrations of civil disobedience instead of bringing suits for desegregation to the courts.
* His unique relationship with President Lyndon Johnson--"the man I loved"--and the failed dream of Johnson's Great Society.
* The personal reasons for Marshall's unrelenting opposition to capital punishment.
Memorable, enormously readable, Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court is a story of a seminal figure of the last century and a history of our time.
