Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution

With 20-20 hindsight, when most people think of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, they remember Brown vs. Board of Education as the case which changed racial relations in America over night.Jack Greenberg's insider's account of the Inc. Fund provides an excellent antidote to this time-warped perspective. Brown vs. Board did not come out of no where, it did not revolutionize race relations over night, and it is not all that the Fund did.Historically, Greenberg provides an overview of the decades long legal strategy, begun prior to the War, which lead up to the Brown decision, and the decade of extraordinarily frustrating litigation that followed. While Brown is an important turning point, it was preceded by a long series of carefully orchestrated piecemal attacks on segregation, each victory carefully built upon until the time was ripe for the Supreme Court to render a favorable decision in a frontal attack on the entire system of legally mandated segregation in Brown.But the Inc. Fund did so much more. It lead the way in employment discrimination, death penalty reform/abolition, prisoners rights, and many, many other fields. During the approximately 30 years covered by Greenberg in depth, no one, including the United States Department of Justice, had a broader array of civil rights cases, and no one other than the United States Government appeared more often before the Supreme Court.An interesting by play throughout the book is the role of racial tension within the "movement". As a white civil rights lawyer, Greenberg was an easy target for all who believed that the struggle against segregation should be lead by blacks. At the same time, there was much soul searching within the NAACP as to how they could discriminate against Greenberg soley because he was wihite, given that the NAACP's reason d'etre was to battle racial discrimination.One final note, while paying appropriate homage to Thurgood Marshall, Greenberg dispells the myth that the Inc. Fund was a one man shop. Its work continued for many years after Marshall left to join the government (one of Lyndon Johnson's finest hours), and continues today.It is a shame that such a worth while book is no longer in print, and never made it out as a paperback. Everyone interested in the judicial system, the post war history of America, or the civil rights movement should read this book.

I didn't want the only review of this book to be the one above. You get the feeling that that reviewer would prefer that African Americans were still taught in tar paper shacks. Remember that segregationists didn't object to busing before '54 when it kept the races separate.The book provided an interesting perspective on the legal battles for civil rights and provided an especially vivid picture of Thurgood Marshall in his younger, heroic days and belied the man I remembered from news reports at the time of the Souter nomination as an old crank.I had two criticisms of the book. The book, like Marshall himself, overstated the legal battle for civil rights and downplayed the efforts of leaders like Martin Luther King. The crusade was fought outside the courts as well. Second, Greenberg provides too much detail on certain points. The book was at least 100 pages too long and sometimes too chronologically jumpy.