David Garrow reviews Ken Mack's Representing the Race in today's Washington Post. Cribbing now from the final paragraph of the review:
“Representing the Race” examines the pre-Brown world of black
lawyers with a perceptive, critical thoughtfulness that sets Mack’s work above
all previous treatments. By eschewing celebratory homage in favor of
tough-minded honesty, he addresses the hardest questions about
representativeness and “racial authenticity” with an acuity and freshness that
resonate forward to the present day. In 1962, when President John F. Kennedy
considered naming William H. Hastie, the country’s only black federal appellate
judge, as the first black Supreme Court justice, Kennedy’s advisers concluded
that Hastie was insufficiently black to be embraced by African Americans. As
Mack ruefully concludes, “lawyers who only a few years before had seemed like
brave representatives of a repressed minority group now seemed inauthentic.”
“Representing the Race” will be a prize-winning book that profoundly alters and
improves our understanding of civil rights history.