The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas - REVIEW

by Daniel Kiel

Every Supreme Court transition presents an opportunity for a shift in the balance of the third branch of American government, but the replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas in 1991 proved particularly momentous. Not only did it shift the ideological balance on the Court; it was inextricably entangled with the persistent American dilemma of race. In The Transition, this most significant transition is explored through the lives and writings of the first two African American justices on Court, touching on the lasting consequences for understandings of American citizenship as well as the central currents of Black political thought over the past century.

In their lives, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas experienced the challenge of living and learning in a world that had enslaved their relatives and that continued to subjugate members of their racial group. On the Court, their judicial writings―often in concurrences or dissents―richly illustrate the ways in which these two individuals embodied these crucial American (and African American) debates―on the balance between state and federal authority, on the government's responsibility to protect its citizens against discrimination, and on the best strategies for pursuing justice. The gap between Justices Marshall and Thomas on these questions cannot be overstated, and it reveals an extraordinary range of thought that has yet to be fully appreciated.

The 1991 transition from Justice Marshall to Justice Thomas has had consequences that are still unfolding at the Court and in society. Arguing that the importance of this transition has been obscured by the relegation of these Justices to the sidelines of Supreme Court history, Daniel Kiel shows that it is their unique perspective as Black justices – the lives they have lived as African Americans and the rooting of their judicial philosophies in the relationship of government to African Americans – that makes this succession echo across generations.

Stanford University Press
ISBN-13: 978-1503630659

The Black Cabinet by Jill Watts - REVIEW

Offering a compelling history of the evolution, impact, and ultimate demise of a New-Deal-era hidden "cabinet" to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on racial affairs, historian Jill Watts' THE BLACK CABINET: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (Grove Press; May 12,2020; ISBN: 978-0-8021-2910-9) illuminates the progress of black citizenship between Reconstruction and the modem Civil Rights movement. 

In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. As the New Deal began, a black Brain Trust joined the administration and began documenting and addressing the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced. They became known as the Black Cabinet, but the environment they faced was reluctant, often hostile, to change. 

"Will the New Deal be a square deal for the Negro?" The black press wondered The Black Cabinet set out to devise solutions to the widespread exclusion of black people from its programs, whether by inventing tools to measure discrimination or by calling attention to the administration's failures. Led by Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, they were instrumental to Roosevelt's continued success with black voters. Operating mostly behind the scenes, they helped push Roosevelt to sign an executive order that outlawed discrimination in the defense industry. They saw victories—jobs and collective agriculture programs that lifted many from poverty—and defeats—the bulldozing of black neighborhoods to build public housing reserved only for whites; Roosevelt's refusal to get behind federal anti-lynching legislation. The Black Cabinet never won official recognition from the president, and with his death, it disappeared from view. But it had changed history. Eventually, one of its members would go on to be the first African American cabinet secretary; another, the first African American federal judge and mentor to Thurgood Marshall. 

Masterfully researched and dramatically told, THE BLACK CABINET brings to life a forgotten generation of leaders who fought post-Reconstruction racial apartheid and whose work served as a bridge that Civil Rights activists traveled to achieve the victories of the 1950s and '60s. 

Jill Watts is the author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, and God, Harlem USA: The Father Divine Story. She teaches in the History department at California State University San Marcos. 

"A well-researched, urgent, and necessary history of black folks during the New Deal that excavates the too often ignored history of black female genius behind racial progress."
 - Michael Eric Dyson, York Times bestselling author 

THE BLACK CABINET: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt
by Jill Watts
Grove Press
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2910-9