By Tomiko Brown-Nagin (SC ’91)

As an elementary school student, I planned to serve the public as a civil rights lawyer.  I was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina, a place of racial extremes and the home of the plantation rich and poor.  U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond—known for his record-long filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964—James Longstreet, the Confederate General—and Governor Ben Tillman, the architect of Jim Crow laws—also hailed from Edgefield County. Within this context, my keen interest in civil rights took root.

Happily, the Truman Foundation awarded me a Harry S. Truman scholarship. It pleased me to be associated with the president who desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces and campaigned on a platform that endorsed civil rights.  I intended to use the Truman scholarship to defray the costs associated with law school.

Over the years and for a variety of reasons, however, my career goals changed, and my conception of public service broadened. I did obtain a law degree and have devoted time to civil rights practice.  But the chief way that I now honor Truman’s commitment to equality—and pursue my own abiding interest in the subject—is through scholarship on constitutional law and history.  

This past month, I published Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University, 2011).  Courage to Dissent moves the historical lens away from familiar actors of the civil rights era such as the legendary lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who famously prevailed in Brown v. Board of Education, and the inner workings of U.S. Supreme Court.  The book shifts the focus to lesser-known, but no less important, lawyers and grassroots activists.  It discusses the careers of attorneys on the political Right and the Left—called “pragmatic” and “movement lawyers”—who sometimes disagreed with Thurgood Marshall’s conception of equality. These lawyers and their clients sought something different from, or more complicated than, “integration.”  The book argues that these figures shaped constitutional law and the path of civil rights in powerful, yet unacknowledged or largely forgotten, ways.

Courage to Dissent adds to the pantheon of historic public interest lawyers three pioneering lawyers from distinct eras.  A.T. Walden, one of the South’s first African- American lawyers and the elder statesman of civil rights, courageously challenged barriers to black voting. But, the book shows, Walden never fully embraced Marshall’s school desegregation strategy.  Donald Hollowell, a skilled legal craftsman and ally of student activists during the 1960s, earned the title “Mr. Civil Rights” for his clever tactics. He also mentored a new generation of activists. Howard Moore, Jr., Hollowell’s protégé, represented clients in three social movements.  He labored for the civil rights, anti-poverty, and peace movements, changing his practice as the concept of “equal rights” evolved during the 1960s and 1970s.   

Each of these attorneys—like so many other African America men across time who sought opportunity and hoped to prove entitlement to first-class citizenship—served in the U.S. Army.  Their experiences in the armed forces tell us much about racial change and stasis in postwar America. Walden, who attended a segregated officers’ training school, served the Army with distinction during a tour of duty in WWI-era France. He rose to the rank of captain.  Hollowell served in an all-black “Buffalo Soldier” regiment during the 1930s; during WWII, after fighting in the European theater, Hollowell also rose to the rank of captain.  Moore, the youngest of the three attorneys, served in the U.S. Army, as well.  But Moore served during the 1950s, in a desegregated armed forces—the army that Harry S Truman built.  Moore served on desegregated posts at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina and Ft. Gordon, Georgia—apparent oases of equity surrounded by segregation.  Nevertheless, like Walden and Hollowell before him, Moore experienced instances of discrimination—both before and after he mustered out of the Army. Hence, whatever the era, each man’s experiences as an African-American solider fortified his pursuit of equality through law.

In his own way, these unsung lawyers—Walden, Hollowell, and Moore—veterans of the Army and soldiers for freedom—together with cooperative members of the Court, Congress, and the Executive Branch, such as President Truman—remade the social and legal orders. Local people, banished from citizenship, nevertheless gave new meaning to the U.S. Constitution. These architects of a more perfect union teach us a lesson about human agency that should endure: it speaks to the issues of our times.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin (SC ’91) is Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law & Professor of History at the University of Virginia.