Exporting American Dreams or Profiles in Courage

Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey

Author: Mary L Dudziak

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 democracyfaltered, but Marshall's African journey remained a cherished memory of a time and a place when all things seemed possible.

Publishers Weekly

While Marshall is best known for his pivotal role during Brown v. Board of Education and his appointment to the Supreme Court, Dudziak (Cold War Civil Rights) recovers a nearly buried undertaking, "one of the great adventures of his life": Marshall's contributions to the Kenyan Bill of Rights. Marshall arrived in London in January 1960; a month later, the Greensboro, N.C., sit-in began, and Marshall found himself "torn between two continents and two movements." The author effectively sketches those events in the civil rights movement (civil disobedience, urban riots, Black Power) and in Kenya (President Kenyatta's early moderation and subsequent mistreatment of the Asian minority and suppression of opposition) that supported and undermined Marshall's "faith in the law as a vehicle for social change." The tensions between Marshall's desire for equal rights and Kenyatta's priorities of "sovereignty and national unity" are still heartbreakingly unresolved, as are Marshall's great hope for the "entrenchment in Kenya of the rights he still hoped for in America." Dudziak's clarity and careful documentation make her book accessible to the general reader and a valuable tool for African and African-American studies. (July)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Steven Puro - Library Journal

In 1960, many post-independence African nations were on the cusp of political and social revolution. To help structure Kenya's society, the Kenyan government invited prominent civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall to help develop a constitution and bill of rights. Dudziak (law & history, Univ. of Southern California Law Sch.) examines the multicultural implications for both Marshall and the Kenyan leaders as they ventured into uncharted territory. Marshall used his American legal consciousness to solve the problems of Kenyan society as it moved from colonial rule to democratic self-government. Dudziak recognizes the social and political disruptions to Kenya's path to democratic norms, including the recent violent crisis following the disputed 2007 presidential election, and contrasts Kenya's peaceful regime change in the early 1960s with contemporary U.S. racial conflicts in many urban areas. She also examines how the conception of democracy and rights varies among cultures. A central element for Marshall was how to develop ideas that would engage newly independent African political power and yet protect the rights of white minorities. In America, Marshall faced the same problem, but the racial proportions were reversed. This book on a less-studied part of Marshall's career is recommended for libraries collecting in law, legal processes, and African and African American history.

Table of Contents:

Map of Kenya

List of Illustrations

Introduction 1

1 Marshall and Mboya 11

2 A Tricky Constitution 37

3 Writing Rights 65

4 Discriminating Friends 97

5 Anarchy Is Anarchy 131

Epilogue 161

App Thurgood Marshall's Draft Bill of Rights for Kenya, 1960 173

Notes 185

Acknowledgments 235

Index 241

Read also Introduction to Computational Genomics or Hashimotos Thyroiditis

Profiles in Courage: Decisive Moments in the Lives of Celebrated Americans

Author: John F Kennedy

In 1954-1955, John F. Kennedy's active role as a Senator in the affairs of the nation was interrupted for the better part of a year by his convalescence from an operation to correct a disability incurred as skipper of a World War II torpedo boat. He used his "idle" hours to great advantage; he rediscovered, and did intensive research into, the courage and patriotism of a handful of Americans who at crucial moments in history had revealed a special sort of greatness: men who disregarded dreadful consequences to their public and private lives to do that one thing which seemed right in itself. These men ranged from the extraordinarily colorful to the near-drab; from the born aristocrats to the self-made. They were men of various political and regional allegiances—their one overriding loyalty was to the United States and to the right as God gave them to see it.

There was John Quincy Adams, who lost his Senate seat and was repudiated in Boston for his support of his father's enemy Thomas Jefferson; Sam Houston, who performed political acts of courage as dramatic as his heroism on the field of battle; Thomas Hart Benton, whose proud and sarcastic tongue fought against the overwhelming odds that insured his political death; and Edmond Ross who "looked down into his open grave" as he saved President Johnson from an impeachment; and Norris of Nebraska; and Taft of Ohio; and Lamar of Mississippi (who did as much as any one man to heal the wounds of civil war). There was Daniel Webster, scourged for his devotion to Union by the most talented array of constituents ever to attack a Senator. For the most part Kennedy's patriots are United States Senators, but he also paystribute to such men as Governor Altgeld of Illinois and Charles Evans Hughes of New York.

And in the opening and closing chapters, which are as inspiring as they are revealing, Kennedy draws on his personal experience to tell something of the satisfactions and burdens of a Senator's job—of the pressures, both outward and inward—and of the standards by which a man of principle must work and live.

John F. Kennedy has used wonderful skill in transforming the facts of history into dramatic personal stories. There are suspense, color and inspiration here, but first of all there is extraordinary understanding of that intangible thing called courage. Courage such as these men shared, Kennedy makes clear, is central to all morality—a man does what he must in spite of personal consequences—and these exciting stories suggest the thought that, without in the least disparaging the courage with which men die, we should not overlook the true greatness adorning those acts of courage with which men must live.