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?
Join us for the 2013 Awards Ceremony
During the Decatur Book FestivalSeptember 1, 2013
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