A Defiant Life

January 4, 1999
Thurgood Marshall's long and influential life of challenging racism and championing affirmative action makes him prime biography material today. Ball, a political science professor at the University of Vermont and author of 16 previous books on the federal judiciary, expertly interweaves Marshall's life with the history of civil rights in America. From the rise of the NAACP--which coincided roughly with Marshall's 1908 birth in segregated Baltimore--to Brown v. The Board of Education, a case that Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953, we see Marshall as a towering figure, an indefatigable adversary of the ruthless and endemic racial discrimination that surrounded him much of his life. As Ball's focus is on legal history, other civil rights leaders, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., are barely mentioned. In contrast to Juan Williams in his recent biography, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (Times Books), Ball skims over Marshall's personal life, either downplaying or omitting details of his heavy drinking, sexual misconduct, poor health, virulent anticommunism and general cantankerousness. Instead, Ball devotes nearly 200 absorbing pages to Marshall's Supreme Court tenure and casework, presenting detailed--but very clear--analyses of pivotal cases in which Marshall was involved, as a NAACP lawyer, as a U.S. Solicitor General and as the first black judge appointed to the Supreme Court. Those cases are Marshall's legacy, and Ball's fine biography places his subject's legal accomplishments squarely in the context of American history. Photos not seen by PW.