Library's review
In the same vein of learning things I didn't know I didn't know (if that makes sense), the book was also a fine introduction to the life of Charles Hamilton Houston, mentor to the more-famous Thurgood Marshall and possibly the key figure in the fight against segregation. Author Rawn James shows how Hamilton's first-hand experience with a racist U.S. Army during World War I informed much of his later work.
My one reservation is that the book does wander a bit back and forth in time, and doesn't always do a great job of signposting just when certain events are taking place. But overall, James does a more-than-capable job of presenting both Houston and Marshall as real human beings, flawed in their own ways but ultimately accomplishing a great deal of good for their country.
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The riveting story of the two crusading lawyers who led the legal battle to end segregation, one case and one courtroom at a time. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement. Charles Hamilton Houston was the pioneer: After becoming the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review, he transformed the law school at all-black Howard University into a West Point for civil rights advocacy. One of Houston's students at Howard was a brash young man named Thurgood Marshall. Soon after Marshall's graduation, Houston and Marshall opened the NAACP's legal office. The abstemious, proper Houston and the folksy, easygoing Marshall made an unlikely duo, but together they faced down angry Southern mobs, negotiated with presidents and senators, and convinced even racist judges and juries that the Constitution demanded equal justice under law for all American citizens. Houston, tragically, would die before his strategy came to fruition in the Brown suit, but Marshall would argue the case victoriously and go on to become the first African-American Supreme Court justice--always crediting his mentor for teaching him everything he knew. Together, the two advocates changed the course of American history.… (more)