Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey | 
| Author: Mary L. Dudziak
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 229378
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0195329015
Dewey Decimal Number: 342.6762085
EAN: 9780195329018
ASIN: 0195329015
Publication Date: July 2, 2008
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Product Description
Thurgood Marshall became a living icon of civil rights when he argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954. Six years later, he was at a crossroads. A rising generation of activists were making sit-ins and demonstrations rather than lawsuits the hallmark of the civil rights movement. What role, he wondered, could he now play? When in 1960 Kenyan independence leaders asked him to help write their constitution, Marshall threw himself into their cause. Here was a new arena in which law might serve as the tool with which to forge a just society.
In Exporting American Dreams , Mary Dudziak recounts with poignancy and power the untold story of Marshall's journey to Africa. African Americans were enslaved when the U.S. constitution was written. In Kenya, Marshall could become something that had not existed in his own country: a black man helping to found a nation. He became friends with Kenyan leaders Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta, serving as advisor to the Kenyans, who needed to demonstrate to Great Britain and to the world that they would treat minority races (whites and Asians) fairly once Africans took power. He crafted a bill of rights, aiding constitutional negotiations that helped enable peaceful regime change, rather than violent resistance.
Marshall's involvement with Kenya's foundation affirmed his faith in law, while also forcing him to understand how the struggle for justice could be compromised by the imperatives of sovereignty. Marshall's beliefs were most sorely tested later in the decade when he became a Supreme Court Justice, even as American cities erupted in flames and civil rights progress stalled. Kenya's first attempt at democracy faltered, but Marshall's African journey remained a cherished memory of a time and a place when all things seemed possible.
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| Customer Reviews:
Already a classic book in my eyes June 24, 2008
Long before Senator Barack Obama was heralded as a man whose balance between African and American worlds would lead to substantive international change, Justice Thurgood Marshall was crafting a legacy of statesmanship, exacting jurisprudence, and diplomacy that matches the great works of any statesman and the human rights legacy of Martin Luther King. As this deeply researched, clearly phrased, and elegantly written book makes known, Justice Marshall's intervention into Kenyan nation-building was always based on a hope that the law and governmental support could provide a system durable enough for both liberty, equality, and efficient organization of people with sometimes divergent views. What I admire most about Justice Marshall is that his work speaks for itself and, despite his human rights advocacy, he never politicized his arguments. They were based on the best kind of legal reasoning possible. This book made me aware of how much the work of the founders of Kenyan and the architects who transformed South Africa from the worse kind of white supremacist state into a flawed state that still reversed bigoted ills through the Truth Commission--this book made me aware that this kind of judicial conflict resolution and nation-building is not often continued in international relations.
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