Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer

by Kenneth W. Mack

Representing the Race tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they were expected to be “authentic”—that is, in sympathy with the black masses. This conundrum, as Kenneth W. Mack shows, continues to reverberate through American politics today.

Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent whites that he was—as nearly as possible—one of them. But he also introduces a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to “represent” a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?

Genres: Law, History, American History, Biography, Race

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Kenneth W. Mack is a historian and the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2000.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clever book, a scholarly project. Any specialist endeavoring to explain the contributions of black American lawyers and judges within the broader struggles for civil rights and who may be portraying these practitioners as racial/and institutional "representatives," will be greatly assisted by this compilation. Like many readers I presume, I thought I would be reading a book about Charles H. Houston. Instead we are treated to a diverse (Chapter 6 could and should be expanded into its own book length treatment) group of people working for many reasons and with means in enough complexity to convince all historians of the "New Left" and the "Civil Rights Movement" that we still have an immense archive of material to process. The scholarship and insights in Mack's book should provide an excellent framework for those future projects, perhaps especially regarding the need for more rigorous exploration of the idea and role of the representative, in both the historiography and the expectations we still impose on lawyers and judges who happen to have emerged from a particular community and/or ethnicity.

[Charles Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was impressed with Mack's thesis--the black lawyer as a representative for his race--and how the role of the civil rights lawyer developed in the 20th century. "His" race, because black women lawyers neither made the headlines nor took on the high-profile cases awarded to their male counterparts. Pauli Murray first coined the term "Jane Crow" to describe this discrepancy.

This topic was made challenging by the stature of Thurgood Marshall, whose picture is on the cover. Nevertheless, Mack was able to demonstrate that stature in the dominant white culture did not always translate into representativeness for the masses of people of color. Be introduced to an array of lawyers--male and female--whose lives and careers have never been considered in such detail.

I had actually been searching for an authoritative source on Pauli Murray, who left the legal profession and was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. I was delighted with how prominent she was throughout this study. This was an interesting, compelling read.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strong portrait of many Black civil rights lawyers as the profession developed over time, pretty accessibly written, although it's a big one note when it comes to the argument (that the courtroom was a uniquely integrated professional space during the Nadir which, at least in the North and border states, allowed Black attorneys to enter the legal brotherhood and build respect and professional networks across the color line, but that the idea of "representative men" simultaneously relied on Black lawyers who were presumed to be able to speak for average Black people, while having quite different lives)

[Jeremy Koenig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mack is a real storyteller with this material. His cast of characters maintain a narrative that is full of insight into the concept of representation. The section on Pauli Murray was fascinating. I can easily imagine this book given treatment for a cable series- something akin to The Wire: the backdrop of Jim/Jane Crow, the South, the courtroom drama, the dismantling of color and gender barriers, the unrest within the NAACP in the late 50s/early 60s. I encourage someone with script-writing chops to get on this!

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mack tries to answer an impossibly hard question here, I interpret it as basically how much can a professional integrate into the vocational fraternity without losing ethnic authenticity in the eyes of the less privileged members of the group from which he sprung. Not sure if theres is an answer, but the wealth of this book comes from the reclaimed history of these not well enough known black lawyers.

[Mills College Library]

340.0922 M1532 2012

[Etienne Toussaint · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great narrative of the history of black lawyers in the US. Very engaging and informative.