>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> I am delighted today to be
introducing our next author.
His name is Kenneth W. Mack, and
he actually started his career
as an electrical engineer.
He says now that he just
majored in the wrong thing,
and his entire career is
essentially the result of a mistake.
And so, history and law
came calling for him.
And he ended up going
to Harvard Law School.
He was a clerk for the
Honorable Robert L. Carter
in the United States District
Court for the Southern District
of New York and practiced
law here in D. C. as well.
And he's now a law professor at
Harvard University and focuses there
on our nation's complicated history,
legal history and racial history.
He's collated a collection of
essays called The New Black,
What Has Changed and What
has Not With Race in America.
And today he's here to talk about
his book Representing the Race,
the Creation of the
Civil Rights Lawyer.
Now if you're anything
like me, when you think
about a civil rights
lawyer you probably think
about Thurgood Marshall.
His book actually focuses
on the pre-Brown vs. Board
of Education period
and those lawyers.
In this book, which historian David
J. Garrow has called a richly,
compelling and impressively
astute volume.
He profiles these lawyers and
renders a portrait of these lawyers
that really labored under a very
particular and specific burden.
He argues that these
lawyers, and these are people
like John Mercer Langston, who was
the first Dean of Howard Law School,
and Raymond Pace Alexander
of Philadelphia.
That they essentially had a very
specific and difficult expectation,
and that is that they over
represent the African-American race,
but also appear to
be nothing like it.
Max describes this band
of lawyers as a fraternity
that crossed the color line.
They're very lives and manner
and bearing an argument
for equal treatment
for African-Americans.
The Washington Post has named this
book one of the top 50 nonfiction
of 2012, and it was a finalist for
the Julia Howe Ward Book Prize.
Please, please join me.
Put your hands together
and welcome Kenneth Mack.
>> Well thank you Leah, excuse
me, thank you Nia [phonetic].
Thank you to the Library of Congress
for inviting me and thank you
for all of you for coming.
What I'd like to do today is
talk a little bit about the book,
a little bit about how
I came to write it.
And I'll read just
a little bit also.
And then we'll take questions.
So the book.
The book's a biographical account of
men and women who changed America.
Men and women who helped
transform America from a country
that denied basic citizenship
rights for a portion
of its citizens based on race.
To the country that we know today
that embraces racial equality
as one of its core principles.
It's a collective biography
of a group
of African-American
civil rights lawyers
who practice law during
the era of Jim Crow.
Lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and
a number of lesser-known figures
like Los Angeles lawyer Loren
Miller, Pauli Murray, who spent some
of her career here in Washing
D. C., Raymond Pace Alexander
in Philadelphia, and a host of
others who aren't that well-known.
This is a story that we think
we know, but that we do not.
In fact, we've all read a little
bit about this story in school.
Some of us read about Brown
vs. Board of Education.
Some of us may have read a
biography of Thurgood Marshall.
But one of the things I tried
to show in the book is that we,
this is a story that's
very, very familiar,
but in fact we don't know
much about it at all.
So I spent about ten years sort
of digging around in the Library
of Congress and lots
of other places.
I tried to change the way that
Americans think about famous figures
like Thurgood Marshall,
and introduce a host
of fiercely unknown characters
to the civil rights narrative.
It's a familiar story
told in an unfamiliar way.
The story I try to tell
in the book is the story
of African-Americans,
as Nia said briefly.
African-Americans who
cross the color line.
But to cross the color
line meant, in fact,
that at the time these were
called Representative Negroes.
This is what African-Americans
called themselves who did this.
They crossed the color
line, but it's something
that black people weren't
really supposed to do.
African-American lawyers
came to court in an era
where there are no black judges.
There are no black jurors.
And your job is to convince a
group of white Americans in the era
of Jim Crow to decide
in favor of your clients
when the entire courtroom is a
deeply prejudiced institution.
So these were Americans
who crossed the color line.
Who had to speak to white
people in a language
that they could understand.
But at the same time, people
thought that they were supposed
to be Representative Negroes.
Which meant that they
were supposed to be
like the rest of African-Americans.
So the book is about this
demand that's continually made
of black people who break through
a barrier that hasn't been broken
through before that they
be like the larger society.
That they be unlike
the rest of the race.
But in fact that they represent the
rest of the race at the same time.
And in the book I talk a lot
about how these lawyers struggled
with this as an issue
through their whole career.
In fact it's a book that's very
much written in the present.
I'm a firm believer that we all
write history in the present.
We write the, ask the
questions that we want to hear.
We want to answer.
And what is our present
racial politics?
Well, we have a confused
racial politics.
Racial identity itself seems more
and more complicated each year.
We have a biracial President born
in Hawaii, who is also heir to all
of the African-American tradition.
And in fact what I really wanted to
do in the book is to show that even
in the era of Jim Crow, in an era in
which race was supposed to be fixed.
We knew who was black
and who was white.
We knew which boxes
they all went to.
We knew which schools they
were supposed to go to.
Even in that era, race was
fluid, and lots of people stepped
across the color line confounded
at the expectations
of blacks and whites.
And among the people who did
this were African-American civil
rights lawyers.
So let me do two, one more thing.
Let me tell you a little bit
about how I came to write it,
because this is a festival
that's all about writing.
It's about books.
It's about people who love books.
And I love books.
And I loved writing this book.
So let me tell you a little bit
about how I came to write it.
And I'm going to read just a little
bit, and then we'll take questions.
Well, as some of you
know, I'm a lawyer.
I'm a law professor at Harvard.
I went to law school.
I graduated about twenty years ago.
And, you know, I went to law school
with a number of people who are,
you know, now doing, you know,
interesting things in life.
Like Barack Obama.
And like most of my classmates,
I spent the next couple
of decades just working,
working, working,
trying to get something
accomplished.
Trying to do something good
in the world and trying
to get my career started.
And I don't know, around 2006 I
was a tenured professor at Harvard.
And I have this book
contract to write a book
about civil rights lawyers.
And so what I did was something
that people at my stage
in their career don't usually do.
I sat down and I thought
for a while.
And like I said, that's
been about a year.
And I'm thinking, how did
I want to write the book.
I began to think, who
was I writing it for?
Who was my audience?
Who did I admire?
Whose writing styles
really, really enthralled me?
And actually one of the people I
admired was the person you heard
just now, Taylor Branch.
And what was my own style?
What were my objectives
for the book?
It took a kind of pause from
this treadmill that I was on,
and I began to ask
all of these questions
that you're not really
supposed to ask of yourself
at this stage in your career.
But, you know, this is one of
the things that tenure is for.
It allows you to ask questions
without thinking that you're going
to get fired the next year.
So I did this, and I
came up with a book.
It's a very different
book than the one I set
out to write at the beginning.
As I said, writing is a process.
It's a journey.
Very different book from the one I
set out to write at the beginning.
And I began to see things in the
stories of these men and women
who practiced law during Jim
Crow that I hadn't seen before.
And that most people
hadn't seen before.
I began to see these stories
that I wanted to tell.
So, let me do one more thing
before we do questions.
Let me read a little bit.
Because I thought a lot about
how I wanted to tell the story.
How I wanted to relate it.
How I wanted to draw the reader in.
And who exactly I wanted
the book to appeal to.
So let me read about a couple
of lawyers that are in the book.
And then we'll talk.
So let me start with a lawyer
named John Mercer Langston.
As Nia mentioned, he was the
first Dean of Howard Law School.
He was also the most prominent
African-American lawyer
in the 19th century.
And he had a very unusual career.
So let me read a little bit.
John Mercer Langston is
only faintly remember today.
Although some have tried
to claim him as a model
for the nation's first
African-American President.
The 19th Century however
was a different matter.
Langston was famous.
Langston was one of the leading
public figures of his day.
He rivaled Frederick Douglass
for prominence in black politics
and earned the trust of
whites that would seem notable
in almost any era of
American history.
Well who was Langston?
Langston was born in 1829 in
Virginia and raised in Ohio.
And he graduated from
Oberlin College in an era
that when most Americans think
that blacks deserved
basic citizenship rights.
Langston was also the son of a white
slave owner, and then the slave
of an African-American
woman who sent his sons
to Ohio to get an education.
Because they weren't going
to be educated in Virginia.
He was biracial, but he was also in
our language and African-American.
So Langston went to Ohio, went to
Oberlin College, became a lawyer,
and then somehow persuaded a steady
stream of whites to beat a path
to his door and hire
him as a lawyer in Ohio
when Ohioans didn't even allow
African-Americans to vote.
He then rose through black and white
politics until he capped his career
by becoming the Dean
of Howard Law School
and the United States
Minister to Haiti.
Langston, as I argue in the book,
was a quintessential 19th
Century representative black man.
To abolitionist-minded
whites, he was a person
in whom they could see a darker
reflection of themselves.
With them Langston seemed
to personify everything the color
race might be once it threw off the
shackles of slavery and
became full citizens.
Langston's improbably
journey, right,
this journey that would see him
get white clients, become the Dean
of Howard Law School and
the US Minister to Haiti.
His improbable journey began with
his decision to become a lawyer.
That was key for Langston.
It gave him the confidence
to speak in public life.
And it allowed him to put, to earn
the trust of whites in the way
that he would later put to good use.
But to become a lawyer,
the person who believed
that he could represent
black people had
to first prove that
he was a white man.
Because African-Americans weren't
allowed to become lawyers in Ohio.
John Mercer Langston, who
was lighter than I was
but certainly not someone
who looked white,
was admitted to the
Bar as a white man.
He went before a panel of judges,
because this was how you got
admitted to the Bar back then.
You go before the judges.
They examine you about, and assessed
your fitness to become a lawyer.
You're learning in law.
And he was very fit.
He had learned a lot.
But there was one problem.
He was black.
Well the lawyer who proposed
him for Bar admission got up,
and he proposed a solution.
And the Chief Judge asked
where is Mr. Langston?
And Langston stood
up in the courtroom.
He looked at him.
Looked at what he looked like.
And promptly swore him
in as a white lawyer.
And this was a sign of how
Langston would rise in the world.
He rose in the world by convincing
whites that he was one of them.
But at the same time, he was
the most prominent black lawyer
in America.
He earned the trust of whites,
and he represented blacks.
This is the kind of story that
I wanted to tell in the book.
In fact, I tell a similar
story about Thurgood Marshall.
Thurgood Marshall rose
to prominence in Maryland
because when Thurgood Marshall
would show up in a town
where nobody had ever seen
a black lawyer before.
And nobody knew how to treat him.
Well, the solution was to try
to treat him like a white man.
Well not completely like
a white man, you all know.
It wasn't like that.
But the solution was to think
about Marshall the way Marshall
could convince white lawyers
and judges to do what he
wanted was to convince them
that he was a Representative
Negro, as it was called.
That he was them.
But at the same time,
Thurgood Marshall was supposed
to represent black people.
And the key that Marshall's career,
the key that would see him rise
to the Supreme Court, first as a
litigant arguing Brown vs. Board
of Education, and later as
a Supreme Court Justice was
that whites could see him
as somebody like them.
But at the same time, they could
see him as African-American.
Well the book is about the
stories of men and women
who all have unusual,
unexpected and surprising stories.
People like Loren Miller.
A lawyer who practiced
in Los Angeles.
He was one of the leading
lawyers who was,
who brought the racially
restrictive covenant cases
that challenged the
restrictions that kept houses
from being sold to black people.
But Loren Miller, he was a black
lawyer, but he was also biracial.
He was born, his mother was white.
His father was black.
He grew up near an Indian
reservation in Kansas.
And he found himself in Los Angeles
where he was in this neighborhood
that was sort of half
African-American and half Japanese.
And Loren Miller was
trying to sort this out.
What did it mean to be
African-American in that kind of a,
that kind of sort of melting pot.
The stew of race and ethnicity.
Well, Loren Miller became best
friends, actually very good friends
with Langston Hughes, and
the two of them traveled
to the Soviet Union in 1932.
And he learned about
race in the Soviet Union.
And he came back to the
United States thinking
that he was a Marxist, and thinking
that he was opposed to people
like Thurgood Marshall
and Charles Houston.
And he spent five years.
He was a lawyers, but he spent five
years writing, writing, writing,
about how lawyers like
Thurgood Marshall were selling
out African-Americans, accusing
them as being not representative.
But, one of the things I tried to do
in the book is, life is complicated,
and Miller's life got
more complicated.
He was 33 years old by this time.
He was married, and
he had a law degree.
And he wasn't making any money.
And, you know, his wife
and other people said,
well you ought to practice law.
And Miller was this
person who always thought
that practicing law was
exactly the wrong thing to do
because Miller was a Marxist.
He thought, you know, law was
just this super structure,
and the real struggle was,
you know, the workers.
And so he goes out and practices
law and by golly, he likes it.
You know, and he's helping people.
And there are all these black
people who are about to be thrown
out of their homes in Los Angeles.
And Miller is the only person who
can save them from being evicted.
And within six months of
practicing law, he changes his mind.
He writes a letter to Charles
Houston, Thurgood Marshall's mentor,
disavowing everything he'd been
saying for the last five years.
And lo and behold, ten
years later, he and Marshall
and Houston are arguing along
one, alongside one another
in the Supreme Court in the
racially restrictive covenant cases.
So these are the kinds of
stories I try to tell in the book.
The stories of the
deeply complicated lives
of African-American lawyers.
Stories that don't quite fit in our
accepted civil rights narrative.
Stories that seem unusual.
Stories that are engaging.
Stories that seem like stories
that would interest us today.
Because I said, as I said, I
write history in the present.
I think about questions that we
would want to have answers to.
So let me read just
a little bit more.
And I'll read about a
lawyer named Pauli Murray.
Who is Pauli Murray?
Pauli Murray was the person, the
one person who more than anyone,
I would say, is responsible
for sex discrimination
being against the law.
Because Pauli Murray was a lawyer.
She was a 1944 graduate
of Howard Law School.
And around the time she
graduated from law school,
she came up with the idea
she called Jane Crow.
Well Jane Crow sounds very familiar.
It's like Jim Crow.
That was her idea.
That there was something
out there called Jim Crow,
which is race segregation which
lots of people were trying
to show was contrary to law.
Well there was something also
out there called Jane Crow.
Sex segregation, and she argued it
was more or less the same thing.
Now this was a radical
thing to say in 1944.
So, let me just read a little
bit about how Pauli Murray came
to have this radical idea
that affects all of us today.
In the fall of 1941, Pauli Murray
arrived in Washington D. C.
for her first year of
study at Howard Law School,
wanting nothing more than
to represent her race
in its struggles with segregation.
Murray described her
civil rights advocacy
as motivated what she called,
who an almost pathetic loyalty
to my racial group, and she
was eager to demonstrate it.
The incident that set
her on the path
to law was a simple trip south the
previous year to see her relatives
which led to her arrest aboard
a segregated bus in Virginia.
Now after her arrest, the NAACP
lawyers came to defend her,
and she loved what she saw.
She loved seeing lawyers like
Thurgood Marshall in court.
And she decided that she
wanted to be one of them.
The following year she began her
studies at Howard Law School,
and earned top honors there.
She was the number one student
in the 1944 graduating
class of Howard Law School.
Which seemed to place
her in the line
to join the civil rights lawyers at
the NAACP because it was a tradition
at Howard that the number one
graduate would go in one way
or another and work for the NAACP.
But Murray was at best
a representative woman,
not a representative man.
And the civil rights courtroom
was off limits to women.
There were no women
civil rights lawyers.
In fact, Murray was
a poor choice even
as a representative
woman of her race.
She arrived at Howard in the
middle of a personal crisis.
Behind the confident façade of the
civil rights crusader was a person
in the middle of a
crisis of identity.
In a world in which people had
to identify as black or white,
Murray thought that she
was a little bit different.
She came from this family where
she said it was a United Nations
in miniature.
Yeah every color was represented.
She had a lot of family members
who could pass for white.
She happen to be one of the
darker members of her family.
And she kind of struggled with
where she fit all of her life.
She was born in Durham,
North Carolina.
She struggled with all
these racial lines.
But, more importantly, in a world in
which people had to identify as men
or women, Pauli Murray felt as
though she was something else.
She felt as though she were a
man trapped in a woman's body.
Many people today call
this transgender.
But she didn't have
that kind of language.
But she was a civil rights lawyer.
And she tried to use
civil rights law
to describe her own
struggle with identity.
She was a woman who wanted to
do the things that men did.
Including become a
civil rights lawyer.
She never went to work
for the NAACP.
She was very disappointed in that.
But, what she came up with was the
idea that the barriers that kept her
out of the civil rights courtroom
were just like the barriers
that kept African-Americans
out of things,
places that were reserved
for whites.
At first, almost no
one believed her.
In 1944, even her professors at
Howard didn't really believe her.
Sex discrimination
wasn't a word then, right.
Jane Crow, people couldn't
figure it out.
But she kept pushing
and pushing and pushing.
Then twenty years later,
people began to believe her,
including a lawyer named Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, who cited Pauli Murray
as one of the principle
influences on her
when she finally convinced
the US Supreme Court
to recognize sex discrimination
as a Constitutional claim.
In 1944, almost no one
believed Pauli Murray
when she said Jane
Crow was like Jim Crow.
But as the years passed,
more and more people did.
Okay, so these are the kinds
of stories I tell in the book.
Stories of the complicated lives
of African-American
lawyers under Jim Crow.
Stories of men and women who
changed the world around them.
Stories of men and
women who struggled
with their own particular
crises, problems, of identity.
Stories of men and women who
struggle with the question
of what it meant to
represent a race.
And I try to tell them as stories.
As wonderful, human stories.
That I spent a lot of
time thinking about,
and I hope that you'll
read about them.
Thanks. So, now I think we're
supposed to have questions, comments
and am I, should I moderate?
Sure. So we have a microphone.
We have two microphones.
So we will alternate.
So I'll start with the
gentleman in the dark blue.
>> Fine. First, congratulations
on this book.
I think you've done this
country a favor with your book.
>> Thank you.
>> I'm wondering, well
two questions.
First, could you talk a little bit
about the political affiliation,
affiliations and identities
of some of these lawyers?
Like who were liberal,
socialists, communists,
like Bill Patterson's
Scottsboro boys.
Republicans like Bill Coleman.
Also, I'm wondering if in addition
to Pauli Murray, if there were any
of the lawyers whom you wrote about
who were lesbian or transgender
or gay, and if that inflected
their work in any way.
>> Okay, so two good questions.
One politics.
So, you know, civil rights,
you know, by the 1960s,
the middle of the 1960s, the civil
rights became very identified
with the Democratic Party.
But as the, as the question
remarked, these lawyers,
you know, they ran the gamut.
They ran the gamut from, there's a
lawyer named Benjamin Davis who's
in the book.
Ben Davis was a Harvard
Law School graduate,
who got beat up almost
literally beat up,
in his first civil
rights trial in Georgia
and joined the Communist
Party, and never went back.
He was so alienated by the
experience of being a lawyer.
It went from him all the way
to lawyers who were very,
very cultural conservative.
There's Bill Coleman,
who's quite old now,
published his autobiography a couple
of years ago but was Secretary
of Transportation for Gerald Ford.
So they ran the gamut.
The second question is about sort
of identity, sexual identity.
You know, it is hard to know.
I wondered a lot about Pauli Murray.
You know, if you look
at pictures of her.
I have two pictures in the book.
And I sort of used them like
there's a picture of her
when she graduates from high school.
And she looks, she's kind
of a 1920s woman, you know,
with that kind of outfit.
There's a picture of her five years
later, and she looks like a boy.
She has very short hair.
She's really thin.
And I always wondered.
But the reason I know is
because she kept a diary.
And she wrote it down.
She also went to see
a bunch of doctors
because she didn't have the
language to describe what she was.
She went to a doctor.
She wrote down what
the doctors told her.
So with her, you know,
you've got it.
But with most people, you don't.
So there are deep and
complicated stories.
I think her story is actually
more complicated than most people.
But there are deep and
complicated stories out there
that we just don't know because
people didn't write it down.
And if she hadn't of written
it down into the diary,
I would look at those pictures.
I would think about it.
But I would never know.
The gentleman in the yellow.
>> During the 2008
election, some comments were,
I don't think they
were meant for public,
but they kind of got
out into the press.
Majority Leader Reed and I
think then Senator Biden,
said some comments like, oh,
Senator Obama, yeah he's okay.
He's clean cut, and in
effect he's not Al Sharpton.
And so, when I was
listening to you talk
about the representative
African-American lawyers,
I started thinking this
sounds pretty similar.
And that the President is
in some ways still having
to live in multiple worlds.
How do you, do you see
any similarities in terms
of the President and the
people that you write about?
>> Ah, very good question.
And, as I say, I write
history in the present.
So like you look at the past
through the lens of the President.
Now I am writing about
the past and trying
to take people seriously
in their own context.
But, I mean, you are inspired
about things in the present.
I was not directly inspired
by Barack Obama, you know,
although we did go
to school together.
But I think I was inspired by a
sort of larger set of questions
that have a lot to do with
the world that we're in.
A world in which, you know,
color lines are being broken.
We not only have an
African-American President,
but we have African-Americans
as heads of major corporations.
You know, during the financial
crisis, one of the people
who was heads of one of the Wall
Street banks that almost went
over was a guy named
Stanley O'Neal, right.
There, you know, we live in a world
where racial barriers are falling.
And I think it's always
true that break
through African-Americans are always
negotiating all of these demands.
You know, are you like, are you
representative of the institution,
the Presidency or New York
investment bank, the larger world,
or are you, quote, unquote
representative of African-Americans.
Are you more authentically black?
Like this question keeps
being asked about Obama.
Is he authentically black?
I think that's absolutely
the wrong question.
Alright, this is a question that's
been asked about African-Americans,
break through African-Americans
like Thurgood Marshall,
I argue in the book.
All the way back.
So, yeah, I think clearly I'm
inspired by things like that.
Not directly by Obama.
But, you know, in the book I
do mention Obama in the end.
I mention Clarence
Thomas at the end.
Because I think they're both
in the middle of this world
in which they're in a world
where African-Americans
are not expected to go.
And at the same time,
they're in a world
in which people demand
that they be authentic.
And they're struggling with it.
And one of the things I
tried to show in the book is
that kind of struggle isn't new.
And it goes all the way back to
the civil rights era and before.
Go ahead.
>> I read that you were an
electrical engineer with Bell Labs.
>> Yes.
>> Doing integrated circuit design.
>> Yes.
>> What made you change
your career so dramatically?
>> Yeah, I started my career
as an electrical engineer.
And I was an electrical engineer
because I guess, I was good in math
and science, and you know,
particularly if you're,
if you're a minority, you're good
in math and science, everybody says,
oh, you should be an engineer.
And my rather was actually
an engineer.
You know, he was the biggest
influence on my entire life.
And I, I majored in the
wrong thing in college.
That's really the realness.
And you know, I majored in engineer.
I worked as an engineer.
And it just, it just wasn't for me.
I didn't love it.
And my job, what I do today, I get
up every day, and I love what I do.
I wish everybody could
feel that way about work.
But I didn't love it.
And went to law school just because
I wanted to do something different.
So, you know, as Nia said, you
know, I think, I like the way
that things have turned out.
I like my career, and it's
all the product of a mistake.
And that's how life is sometimes.
>> Yes, a couple of weeks ago we
were here celebrating the march
on Washington.
And we were reminded that there
would not have been a President
Obama without a Dr. King.
And I'm convinced there would
not have been a Dr. King
without a Mahatma Gandhi.
And I'm wondering if the people
you studied, how conscious,
self-conscious they were of being
part of a long term movement
in development of non-violence
civil resistance
as an instrument for social change?
>> Yeah, this is very interesting.
The question about
non-violence and Mahatma Gandhi.
You know Gandhian ideas
were circulating
in the United States
by the late 1930s.
And some of the lawyers in the book
were deeply influenced by them.
In particular, Pauli Murray.
You know, when Pauli
Murray, she became a lawyer
after she got arrested on
this bus in Virginia in 1940.
And she was arrested on the bus
because she thought she
was practicing Gandhian
civil disobedience.
She was in this circle of people
in New York who were reading
about Gandhi and thinking
about how to put
that into practice
in the United States.
And so she went down to Virginia,
and she thought, you know,
she'd do this on the bus.
And not only did she do it on
the bus, when she came to court
to testify, she thought that she was
practicing Candhian non-violence.
And she became really, really
enthralled with the courtroom.
And, yes, so she was very,
very influenced by it.
Some other people were.
But even [inaudible] in
the book, Harris Wofford,
who was staff on the Kennedy
administration briefly as Senator
from Pennsylvania,
was also somebody.
He went to Howard Law School.
He's a white man who went
to Howard Law School.
Howard actually has had white
students all the way back.
And he was very influenced
by Gandhi and non-violence.
And I think after he gets out
of law school writes a memo
to Thurgood Marshall
saying, you know,
you guys need to be doing
Gandhi and non-violence.
But, Marshall wasn't
that sympathetic.
So, yeah, lots of people in
the book were influenced,
some people in the book were
influenced by Gandhi and ideas
and some people were not.
>> Hello.
>> Who's next?
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
>> Hello. I was wondering what are
the current civil rights issues
facing African-Americans today?
>> I think civil rights.
I, actually I have a
new book about this.
It's called The New
Black, What is Changing
and What is Not with
Race in America.
But I, you know, in the book I and
a bunch of other people argue that,
you know, the civil rights issues of
today are not the civil rights ideas
of a generation, excuse me,
civil rights issues are
not the civil rights issues
of a generation ago.
In some ways they are.
In some ways they're not.
I would think the biggest civil
rights issue right now is the fact
that an entire generation
of African-American men are
essentially being sent to prison,
and no one seems to care.
Me, you know.
And it is and isn't a civil rights
issue like a generation ago.
Right, there's not
outright discrimination.
But in fact there's lots of stuff
that, that looks a little bit
like discrimination and
that helps it to happen.
And we have basically very little
public policy that's trying
to address this.
I mean, every now and then,
right, so it's, you know,
it's not an accident, you know.
Eric Holder is the first
African-American Attorney General.
It's not an accident that
Holder has been, you know,
he announced a policy
not long ago, you know,
essentially that the Department of
Justice is going to not try to put
as many people in jail even
when the law seems to require
that they sentence
someone to jail, right.
So, there are people
who worry about it.
There are people who are trying
to get some traction with it.
We're in a huge debate about
education policy right now.
And that debate is exactly
about how to improve schools.
And I think if you could,
if you could do two things,
if you could get black men to
graduate from high school and go
to college, you dramatically
decrease the likelihood of winding
up in the criminal justice system.
So if you do two things,
improve the quality of education,
and prevent so many people
from being sent to jail,
you get something,
you get an incredible.
Okay, and I'll say one last thing.
In my other book there's
one statistic in the book
between about 19, let's say
about 1975 and say 1995, in 1995,
if you're a black man with some
degree of college education,
you are less likely to go to
prison than you were in 1975.
In 1995, if you're a black man
without a high school diploma,
there's something like, I don't
know, I'm going to get this wrong,
it's something like four
times as likely to go
to prison as you were in 1975.
That's what we've done.
That's what we did in twenty years.
And the number one civil rights
issue today is to undo that.
>> Thank you.
>> Excellent presentation
by the way.
What take away, or what lessons do
you think modern public interest
lawyers, which is the new
term for civil rights lawyers,
can take from the figures
that you wrote about.
And also, do you think that the
economic crisis, the lack of funding
for public interest organization
and the high student loan rates
is lowering the amounts of,
the number of people that go into
civil rights law as a practice.
>> Okay, you know lessons for
present civil rights lawyers.
I mean I think that one of
the things I try to talk
about in the book is that all the
way back, civil rights lawyers,
the question that Thurgood
Marshall struggled
with his entire career was
how to be representative.
And what I do in the book is I
make representation to a question.
You know he struggled with, am
I representing the larger group?
What's my relationship
to the larger group?
To some extent being a lawyer
meant that he was different.
His, his key to the
system was being different
from the masses of
African-Americans.
That's why white lawyers and
judges could accept him in court,
and that's why he could win.
And I think this is
something that, you know,
public interest lawyers
struggle with today, right.
You are representing a group.
Sometimes you're a
member of the group.
Sometimes you're not
a member of the group.
But what is that relationship
between the lawyer, the advocate,
the person who has greater access
to the legal system representing all
of these people who don't?
And there's not a right
answer to that.
But it's just always
a question you've got
to keep asking and asking yourself.
Okay. Second half of the question
was the sorry, where are you?
Give me the second
half of the question.
>> The second half
was asking whether
or not you think there are going
to be fewer people entering
into the public interest
civil rights field.
>> Yes. Well two things, right.
One, we're in the middle
of madness right now.
And I should say this, right.
I mean, the federal
government is going to shut
down on October 1st,
maybe, probably.
I think. And if it doesn't shut down
on October 1st, on October 15th,
the federal government will
lose its ability to borrow.
And, there's a Bill in
Congress to cut, you know,
millions of dollars
from food stamps.
And, those kind of public policies
disproportionally impact the,
the ability to offer legal services
to people who can't afford them.
The ability to offer health care.
The ability to offer a variety of
social services to, to a wide group
of Americans when we are struggling
to get out of a recession.
So, the short answer to
the question is yeah.
I mean resources for
public interest advocacy
of any kind have been dwindling
over the past generation.
Public resources.
And we're in the middle of
something that is crazy.
And that's not too
strong a word for it.
And the craziness.
And the craziness will
disproportionally affect those
who are in most need
of those services.
And it's not just racial minorities.
Lots of people in America
will be affected
by the madness that we're in.
And, I, I am, I am not going to
say anything more pointed than that
because we're in a
non-partisan gathering.
But it is madness.
Thanks.
>> You speak very eloquently
in regards
to the civil rights movement,
and thank you for that.
But my question is this, have
you ever done any research
about those people who've advocated
throughout the judicial process,
advocating for civil
rights who are not lawyers?
>> I'm sorry, can, oh, not lawyers?
>> Yes.
>> Ah, yes.
>> The pro, the pro se
civil litigant who advocated
for civil rights on
behalf of the great mass.
The public interest.
>> And I, I confess,
I haven't done a lot
of research on pro se litigants.
I also haven't done
a lot of research
on people who are not lawyers.
Social movements.
Lots of other people are
doing that kind of work.
It's very, very needed.
You, you know, you can only
do so much in one book.
So I kind of do something
in one book.
But, you know, I agree 100 percent
with the rest of the question.
And it's something that we,
you know, I'm a historian.
We historians struggle with it
because the people who it's easy
to right about, easiest to
write about, are the people
who have the most education.
The people who leave papers behind.
The people who leave some
mark of their presence.
And it's very hard to write about
other folks, but we have to.
I think we are at time.
So thank you for a
wonderful set of questions.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.