Product Description

Thurgood Marshall changed American history by challenging it. In the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans were often treated as second-class citizens and subject to ???Jim Crow??? laws, which promoted both racism and segregation. This is the world that Marshall grew up in, and he became a lawyer to change it. As the head counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he helped take the famous Brown v. Board of Education all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in an outcome surprising even to him, the court unanimously ruled to end segregation in schools. Thurgood Marshall had become a hero.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #479487 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up—Crowe opens by describing the restrictions that circumscribed the lives of African Americans, including Marshall, before and during the civil rights era, and then covers his childhood, education, and professional years. The author devotes several chapters to the man's brave and dedicated legal work for the NAACP, his strategy in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case, and his years as Solicitor General and Supreme Court Justice, concluding with a chapter on his legacy as a civil rights giant. The book is generally admiring of Marshall and uses excerpts from primary sources to help readers become acquainted with both the professional who worked ceaselessly to improve civil rights and the private individual who had a well-developed sense of humor and expressed opinions in blunt and occasionally salty language. The text is supplemented with average-quality black-and-white photos. Although this book draws on recently published material, it does not significantly expand upon what can be found in James Haskins's well-written Thurgood Marshall (Holt, 1992; o.p.). Additional.—Mary Mueller, Rolla Junior High School, MO
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From Booklist
Marshall served 24 years as the first African American judge on the U.S. Supreme Court,  but this biography in the Up Close series focuses on his pioneer work as a lawyer and civil rights activist and on the landmark cases in which he fought segregation in public education and elsewhere. Framed by the detailed drama of the Brown v. Board of Education case, where, as lawyer for the NAACP, he successfully defeated the established separate-but-equal argument, the chatty, immediate discussion relates Marshall’s personal experience to the political history. Crowe is frank about Marshall’s disagreements with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and also about the racist insults (including the n-word) that were part of Marshall’s experience as citizen, lawyer, and activist. Marshall argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them, and the eloquent quotes from his speeches are the core of this biography. The back matter is extensive, with Crowe including personal discussion of sources. Grades 6-12. --Hazel Rochman