Photo By Darren Harrison | Author Rawn M. James, Jr. sits in his office on the Washington Navy Yard with a copy...... read more read more
By Darren Harrison
Naval District Washington Public Affairs
WASHINGTON - One of the newest non-fiction books on display at the "Borders" downtown Washington, D.C. bookstore is a historical tome by Special Trial Attorney Rawn M. James, Jr. who works for the Office of the General Counsel on the Washington Navy Yard.
The book, entitled "Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall and the Struggle to End Segregation," is the realization of James' dream to be a published writer and the culmination of a four year effort to bring to light one of the "little-known" chapters in American history.
"Most people know who Marshall is, but not a whole lot of people, especially outside of the legal profession know who Charles Hamilton Houston was," said James. "Charles Hamilton Houston was the architect of the legal strategy that paved the way for Brown vs. Board of Education as well as Thurgood Marshall's law professor, mentor and close friend. And together they worked the cases that over a period of decades paved the way for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision."
"I've always wanted to be a writer as well as an attorney," James said. "And there are some stories you want to tell and there are some stories you stumble across that are stories that need to be told, and that's really what this is."
The book charts the lives of Houston and Marshall and the equalization strategy pursued in light of the "Separate but Equal" doctrine that was established by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The "Separate but Equal" doctrine remained the standard until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.
Realizing that they could not argue for integration directly, Houston and Marshall set about to ensure that African American students were afforded equal opportunities and they began with a focus on the law schools.
In 1936 with the case Murray vs Maryland, Houston and Marshall took on the case of an Amherst College graduate who wanted to go to law school in Maryland. However there was no state law school for African American students in Maryland which allowed Houston to argue that under separate but equal the student had to be allowed into the University of Maryland Law School. The court agreed and Murray was subsequently admitted into the University of Maryland Law School.
By 1950 the equalization strategy had reached what James refers to as the intangibles. In that year the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took on the case of George McLaurin, a man who wanted to go to the University of Oklahoma Graduate School.
The NAACP argued that the school had violated the Fourteenth Amendment when it admitted McLaurin to its graduate college but then tried to segregate him while he was on campus by putting him in a side room. The Supreme Court agreed.
"So at that point they had gotten to the intangibles," James said. "They had moved from this building is unequal, this library is unequal or you simply don't have a law school, to the point of the intangibles, saying that even though a student can hear everything if they are not allowed to sit there in the classroom that that in of itself is unequal. And once they had gotten to that point they decided they could move it down to the high schools."
In writing his book James spent weekends and nights combing through Charles Hamilton Houston's papers at Howard Law School, letters between Houston and Marshall at the NAACP archive in the Library of Congress and also drawing heavily from newspaper accounts.
James said newspapers are a valuable resource because they provide information not available from biographies, letters or legal briefs, such as the dialogue.
"The newspaper articles help paint a picture and that's what I did in the book," James said. "Paint a full, well rounded picture of the people involved as well as the cases."
According to James the fact that Houston had not been given his due recognition by the history books was a "source of frustration" for Marshall throughout his career even when Marshall was on the Supreme Court. Marshall once gave a talk at Amherst where Marshall said that everything he learned about the law he had learned from Charles Hamilton Houston.
"Marshall believed the reason people did not know about Charles Hamilton Houston was that Houston died at the age of 54 in 1950, four years before the Supreme Court decided Brown," James said. "There are many books written about Thurgood Marshall, but I wanted to shed new light on it and not just be another Thurgood Marshall book on the shelf by bringing something to the canon that people did not know."
Bloomsbury is publishing the book in written format, while an audio version is available from Random House.
| Date Taken: | 02.04.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 02.04.2010 08:08 |
| Story ID: | 44884 |
| Location: |
| Web Views: | 447 |
| Downloads: | 333 |
This work, Washington Navy Yard Worker Charts Civil Rights Struggle in New Book, by Darren Harrison, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
