Book description
Although widely viewed as the beginning of the legal struggle to
end segregation, the U. S. Supreme Court's decision Brown v. Board of
Education was in fact the culmination of decades of legal challenges
led by a band of lawyers intent on dismantling segregation one statute
at a time. Root and Branch is the compelling story of the
fiercely committed laywers that constructed the legal foundation for
what we now call the civil rights movement.
Charles Hamilton Houston laid the groundwork, reinventing the law
school at Howard University (where he taught a young, brash Thurgood
Marshall) and becoming special counsel to the NAACP. Later Houston and
Marshall traveled through the hostile South, looking for cases with
which to dismantle America's long-systematized racism, often at great
personal risk. The abstemious, buttoned-down Houston and the folksy,
easygoing Marshall made an unlikely pair-but their accomplishments in
bringing down Jim Crow made an unforgettable impact on U. S. legal history.
In his new book
Root and Branch
, Rawn James Jr...has done an outstanding job in recounting the
tale...makes for compelling reading...James's book makes a valuable
contribution to our collective remembrance of two extraordinary lawyers.
Rawn James, Jr. is a DC-based writer and a former
assistant attorney general for the District of Columbia, where he
still practices law. His writing has been featured in the
Washington Post, Northern Virginia Magazine,
Primavera Literary Magazine, and the Adirondack
Review. He is also a regular contributor to the website of the
local NBC television station. He is active in Alpha Phi Alpha
Fraternity, the nation s oldest African-American fraternity, of which
Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall were also members.
