Young Thurgood

October 15, 2012
University of Maryland law professor Gibson highlights the formative years of the revered African-American civil rights lawyer and Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), in this straightforward professional and personal biography. Organized linearly, Gibson traces Marshall’s family background and academic path, and then builds on this picture by detailing Marshall’s early professional life, during which time the young lawyer engages in a dogged, pragmatic, and principled fight against the overt racism then pervasive in Southern culture. White society’s comfort with brutal, uncontained prejudice and its hostility to change is shocking and makes for riveting reading. Among the blatant practices Marshall and his colleagues challenge are segregated schools, systemically lower pay for African-American teachers, bars on the admittance of African-Americans to professional schools, the toleration of lynching, and a justice system providing little justice for African-Americans. The writing is unadorned and accessible, and augmented by numerous newspaper articles and photos. Marshall’s role as the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court has rightly made him an emblematic figure, and Gibson demonstrates that Marshall’s early years were not mere harbingers of a future place among civil rights giants, but by themselves qualified him for a place in history. Gibson succeeds in making Marshall’s story immediate and vital. Agent: Jean V. Naggar Literary.

October 1, 2012
In his debut, Gibson (Univ. of Maryland School of Law) looks at the early years of the legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993). Marshall, a brilliant legal mind, became the first black Supreme Court justice in 1967, and before that, he was the chief counsel for the plaintiffs in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, in which school segregation was declared unconstitutional. But while Marshall's law career has been amply covered by other biographers, his earlier life has gotten relatively short shrift. This biography, by contrast, focuses solely on the first 30 years of Marshall's life. Growing up, Marshall intensely discussed politics and race relations with his father. "He never told me to be a lawyer, but he turned me into one," Marshall later said. Indeed, Gibson writes that Marshall inherited his family members' assertive and deeply hardworking natures. Marshall experienced segregation firsthand, attending an all-black high school; he refined his brilliant debating style on the debate team there and, later, at historically black Lincoln University. Gibson also covers Marshall's time at Howard University Law School and his first cases as a Baltimore lawyer, which led to his work with the NAACP and civil rights law. The author, who met Marshall a few times in the 1970s and '80s, writes in his introduction of how he wished to correct the record regarding some details of Marshall's early life--noting, for example, that while some sources have claimed that Marshall was a mediocre student before law school, Gibson's research found that Marshall had in fact graduated high school with honors at the age of 16. But this biography also deftly evokes the atmosphere in which Marshall developed his talents and effectively sketches the many people and events that influenced him. A well-researched and engaging biography and a fine addition to Marshall scholarship.

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December 1, 2012

This biography of Thurgood Marshall from childhood through his early law career is the first approved by the justice's family. Gibson (law, Francis King Carey Sch. of Law, Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore) interviewed Marshall's relatives, classmates, and colleagues to paint a comprehensive picture of Marshall's early life. He vividly describes Baltimore (and Maryland) in the early part of the 20th century, from his birth in 1907 to the late 1930s, when he represented black teachers seeking salaries equal to those of their white colleagues. Gibson is especially attentive to the role education and family played in Marshall's life, and pays particular attention to Marshall's experience at Baltimore's Colored High School, where the faculty was college educated and often held more advanced degrees than their white counterparts at other schools. VERDICT This book is as much a history of the black experience in early 20th-century Baltimore as it is a biography of Thurgood Marshall. Readers who are interested in Marshall's early life will enjoy this book, but those who want a more comprehensive study of his career and judicial reasoning should look elsewhere.--Becky Kennedy, Atlanta-Fulton P.L.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2012
Gibson shared with Marshall the profession of law and the hometown of Baltimore. Those commonalities and scores of interviews with Marshall's friends, family, mentors, and colleagues give legal scholar Gibson a particular perspective on the formative experiences and driving forces that led to Marshall's historic career as a civil rights attorney and Supreme Court justice. He focuses on Marshall's first 30 years, before he joined the NAACP staff. While several biographies have been written about Marshall as an iconic figure, Gibson examines the people and experiences that made Marshall challenge the status quo of his time. He debunks myths about Marshall: for instance, that he hated Baltimore, when what he hated was its segregation, and that he was a late bloomer, when in fact he showed great promise as an intellect and debater early in life. Gibson highlights Marshall's youthful influences and the racial injustices that spurred him to be a passionate advocate for equality as he took on the lawsuits and campaigns that eventually led to the Brown decision. Photographs enhance this insightful portrait of a complex man.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)