Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement

"Sullivan’s book is a story that all Americans, and many people around the world, should know – the story of how we moved from a society whose basic law imposed a racial hierarchy to one where the basic principle, although not always complied with, is equality. She wants you to understand the true story of that change. Sullivan tells us how American law became egalitarian, and the story of the NAACP as a key actor in that process. The NAACP’s litigation programme resulted in Brown v. Board of Education . The story of reform litigation is often told as the story of elite lawyers arguing before courts. Sullivan doesn’t just tell you about trials and appeals, she wants you to understand how much work it took on the local level, to produce a landmark Supreme Court victory. Local communities had to organise to support litigation, organisationally and financially. Lawyers had to solicit their support and strategise with community organisers. To get the Supreme Court to decide a case took effort that went all the way down to the grass roots of African American society, and to the white reformers who supported their efforts. It has become fashionable to discount major court decisions – decisions such Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education , or the Warren Court’s criminal procedure decisions. There is a tendency to say that the decisions were not very effective, and that all they did was mobilise opposition and invite backlash. One thing to keep in mind is that many of these cases had unexpected effects on American society. To give you one example, Dr Martin Luther King Junior was an unknown southern black minister until the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted him to national prominence. The boycott, where black Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride segregated buses from 1955 to 1956, eventually forced local authorities to integrate the buses and helped set the stage for the civil rights protests of the 1960s. What is less well known is that the boycotters also filed a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s bus segregation law. That suit reached the Supreme Court just as the local authorities were preparing to squelch the boycott, and the Court invalidated the bus segregation law in a short opinion that cited Brown as authority for the Court’s action. Many people argue that Brown did little to change American life, but without Brown the boycott arguably fails and a very important period in American history plays itself out differently from the history that is now familiar to all of us. Litigation was intertwined with grassroots activism, as leaders like Martin Luther King knew quite well. There are many ways in which landmark Supreme Court decisions affect society. It’s important not to overlook that fact in an era when liberal Americans in particular have become pessimistic about law, and the Supreme Court. That is one of the main points of Sullivan’s book and it is the reason I included it in the list. She shows you that NAACP, from its inception, understood how activism assisted litigation and how litigation could forward the cause of activists. “Litigation was intertwined with grassroots activism, as leaders like Martin Luther King knew quite well. ” They understood they had to mobilise all the way down to the grassroots to support a litigation programme, and that litigation could be a mobilising tool that would help them raise funds and establish local chapters. Sullivan also serves as a reminder that the egalitarian tradition among scholars of American citizenship is alive and well."