In 1966 Julian Bond, in the face
of blistering criticism for his opposition to the Vietnam War, said “I hope
that throughout my life I shall always have the courage to dissent. It is from
this statement that Tomiko Brown-Nagin takes the title of her Lillian Smith
award-winning book, Courage to Dissent:
Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a professor
of law and history at Harvard University, and she previously held appointments
at the University of Virginia and Washington University. Dr. Brown-Nagin earned
her Ph.D in history from Duke, a law degree from Yale (where she served as
editor of the Law Review), and a Bachelor’s Degree from Furman.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin has written a
remarkable and highly praised book in Courage
to Dissent. It is a bottom-up narrative, illuminating the parts played by
local activists and attorneys. These were people whose courage to dissent
applied, not only to the white establishment, but also to the traditional black
leadership of Atlanta, the national civil rights movement, and the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund’s high-profile attorneys.
Their dissention, Dr. Brown-Nagin argues, created an intra-racial
tension that helped to energize the movement in Atlanta.
In a review of Courage to Dissent,
Kathryn Naistrom writes that the book succeeds brilliantly, both as narrative
history and legal analysis. For Lillian
Smith Book Award winner Ariela Gross, Brown-Nagin’s work heralds a new kind of
constitutional history – that it’s a book that tells the stories of the good
fight waged by ordinary people who, whether or not they actually won, had their
day in court and became agents of change.
In March 2012 Columbia University
announced that Courage to Dissent
would receive the 2012 Bancroft Prize.
In accepting a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2012, Professor Brown-Nagin remarked as follows:
"The book is subtitled Long History of the Civil Rights Movement,
which means that it hopes to complicate the narrative of the civil rights
movement that we have grown accustomed to – a narrative that centers on the
brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund and the heroics of
the Warren Court. When I started this work many years ago a lot of people were
resistant to the thrust of the work. They said: Brown v. Board of Education was American’s finest hour; Why would
you want to tell a story in which that case is not central to the story? But I
think it takes nothing away from the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the
heroics of the court to talk about people on the left and the right who thought
in terms of something more complicated than integration when they thought about
equality, people like Julian Bond, Lonnie King, Lynn Holt, and Ethel Mae
Matthews. It’s important to realize the
agency that they had how they, along with these national institutions helped to
form a more perfect union.
"Although I eventually came around
to thinking of all of the wonderful people in this book as dissenters, when I
first started this book I was actually just as beholden to the traditional
narrative as anyone else. I went to law school because of Thurgood Marshall. I am a child of Brown v. Board of Education.
And so the process of writing this book was a conscious effort on my part to be
fair to all of the characters in my book, despite their many perspectives, some
of which I originally couldn’t understand and didn’t necessarily like.
"Len Holt was a lawyer with the
Lawyers Guild, which was tainted as a Communist organization, and who hasn’t
received his due.
"Ethel May Matthews was a warrior
for civil rights whom I interviewed in the housing projects of Atlanta, who
taught me more than virtually anyone about the struggle against Jim Crow and
the class dynamic.
"One person in the book who
symbolized my professional struggle was A.T. Walden. The son of slaves and one
of the South’s first African America lawyers, Walden had been understood as a
conservative, a foil of the students and progressives. He was called a conservative and an Uncle Tom
and, when I first came to this work, I frankly understood why he would have
been called those names. He was
skeptical, and he never embraced school desegregation or direct action. But as
I wrote the book, as I went to the archives and did a lot of digging, I learned
his history: that he was a complicated man who had been moved to go to law
school after seeing the lynched body of a black man in his home town. I learned that he was a student of W.E.B. DuBois,
a man whom he considered a prophet and a seer. I came to understand that his
critique of the struggle for integration as only being about integration and
school desegregation was in many ways similar to DuBois’ critique. Over time, I came to understand that in order
to write a nuanced narrative of the civil rights movement, it is important to
appreciate how much history is biography."
