Justin Driver has a fascinating, disturbing review in the New Republic of a new book by Robert L. Carter, who labored in the shadows as Thurgood Marshall’s number two man in the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for most of his career.
As Carter tells it, he was the power behind the throne who should have ascended to the throne. It was he, and not Marshall, who
was the source of the energy and vision generating Court decisions affording black people equality under law, for which [Marshall] received credit. That Thurgood was receiving credit was not an issue with me for a time.
But, as Driver notes, “[t]hat time, of course, did not last.”
Carter’s book, and even Driver’s thorough and powerful review, may well tell you more than you want to know about the NAACP LDF’s long march toward racial equality, but the review at least is well worth your time. As good as the review is, however, I think it could have been better in analyzing what was perhaps the most dramatic cause of Carter’s embitterment — Marshall’s selection of Jack Greenberg, a white (although Jewish) man, to succeed him as head of LDF, not Carter.
Carter was understandably angry about being rejected, but the form his anger took was to denigrate the contributions of whites altogether in the civil rights movement and inside the LDF. In short, he turned to an outspoken, angry identity politics.
In an issue of The Nation commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown, Carter derided the contributions of whites to desegregation efforts and claimed that the landmark decision was “the product of black legal skill and strategy.” Brown, he wrote, came embossed with an “African-American cultural copyright.”
Driver’s response is to confront this argument on its own terms, to say, in effect, it ain’t so.
Carter’s central argument in that essay is—to borrow a phrase from Charles Black, a Columbia law professor who aided LDF with Brown—either a truism or a canard. It is a truism if Carter means that black lawyers took the lead in structuring the attack on Jim Crow in the 1940s and 1950s. That contention does nothing to upset the conventional wisdom. Who, precisely, is Carter disabusing of the notion that Brown carries a “white cultural copyright”? But Carter’s statement is a canard if he means that whites did nothing worth mentioning in the legal struggle against segregation. Leading up to Brown, LDF engaged in an intensely collaborative effort that drew on the expertise of a wide range of lawyers and historians, many of whom were black but some of whom were white. Indeed, one of Marshall’s most impressive gifts was his ability to assemble a wide array of talented people, consider competing tactical advice, and arrive at an appropriate decision. Yes, blacks took the lead, but to deny that Louis Pollak, Charles Black, Jack Weinstein, and C. Vann Woodward, among others, helped to produce the strategy is to deny reality.
Driver is, of course, correct here, but his argument aims too low. Carter is indeed wrong to to read whites out of the struggle for equality, but he is even more profoundly wrong to imply that the equality being sought was the result of a uniquely black “vision” that imprinted an “African-American cultural copyright” on the result.
Carter writes that it was“ [m]y vision and creative legal skills [that] produced these landmark race relations gains,” but what exactly was that “vision” and where did it come from? Why did it succeed? Whether the particular legal journeymen, even visionaries, were black or white or something in between is ultimately of much less significance than that they articulated a uniquely American vision, born of America’s struggle with and against slavery and its aftermath.
The principle that all Americans have a right to be treated “without regard” to race, creed, or color is powerful precisely because its power does not depend on the race, creed, or color of the people who defend it. The great success of the multi-racial civil rights movement was to push that principle to the fore, to demand that it be honored in practice as well as in theory. The great mistake and even shame of that same multi-racial civil rights movement was to abandon that principle almost immediately after it was enacted into law. That abandonment is a much greater shame than Robert Carter’s personal pique, explained so well here.
I wonder how Mr. Carter felt about the white federal judges (especially in the South)who enforced Brown and its progeny often at great personal sacrifice.
Frank Johnson and John Minor Wisdom are two that come immediately to mind, but there were many more.