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.
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