Overview

As chief legal assistant to Thurgood Marshall and, later, as General Counsel to the NAACP, Robert L. Carter played a central role in crafting the legal strategy for the pivotal cases of the civil rights era-arguing and winning over twenty pivotal cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board, with Thurgood Marshall. A Matter of Law is the extraordinary story of Carter's struggle for equal rights for all Americans. Carter's history with the NAACP during its pivotal years (19451968) is at the center of this memoir, which offers a rare personal account of how the legal campaign in Brown was mounted. In the aftermath of Brown, Carter turned his attention to broadening the application of Brown to challenge racial inequality in Northern schools. His account of the NAACP's efforts to expose the pervasive nature of school segregation in the North brings this history to the forefront for the first time-and is essential to any discussion of the limitations of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Carter's postNAACP career enabled him to participate in and reflect on the fight for racial justice from a variety of vantage points, most recently as a federal district judge in New York. He brings a fresh and critical perspective to bear on the long-term consequences of the civil rights movement and the need for new and innovative approaches to the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.

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9781565848306

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An architect of the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education suit recalls a long life spent fighting for equal treatment under the law. Born in 1917 in Florida, Carter was taken as an infant to New Jersey. For all the supposed advancement above the Mason-Dixon line, he writes, I am more alienated from whites than are black southerners of my generation. Surely, by this account, he has many reasons to be alienated. New Jersey schools were segregated in fact as well as in law; when he was in high school, Carter recalls, the state Supreme Court ruled that public school facilities had to be made available to all students; and when he reported this to his teachers, he was immediately threatened with expulsion. As the first black graduate law student at Columbia, Carter met with his professors' certainty that he was not up to the task merely by virtue of his ethnicity. And in the Army during WWII, Carter was accused of being a troublemaker, demoted from junior officer ranking and made eligible for draft as an enlisted man, though his demotion was later adjusted to an honorable discharge disqualifying him from further service. Without the army experience, Carter writes, I might have discounted the impact of race and believed falsely that a black man could rise or fall based on his own talents. Carter's years of service as assistant to NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall, as the organization's general counsel and, later, as a federal judge, did much to convince him otherwise. There are useful revelations here. For one, while Brown v. Board proved to be critically important in ending school segregation, Carter reveals that the NAACP had been preparing cases throughout the former Confederacy, finally choosing Kansas because we might get a ruling in our favor, or a different kind of analysis of the problem than we could expect from the Deep South. A thoughtfully argued memoir that shows-as if proof were needed-that the struggle to make equality for all people a fundamental tenet in our society continues. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Judge Robert L. Carter (19172012) was United States District Judge in the Southern District of New York. Judge Carter was a graduate of Lincoln University, the Howard University School of Law, and Columbia University Law School, and received numerous honorary degrees and awards.

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