New from the University of North Carolina Press: Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights, by Richard A. Rosen (University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Joseph Mosnier (independent scholar). A description from the Press:
Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark.
In this biography, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, they reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.
A few blurbs:
“This is a terrific book. Telling the story of Chambers and his law firm, Rosen and Mosnier have added a chapter that has long been missing from the history of the North Carolina civil rights movement. Many other historians have touched on aspects of Chambers’s life and work, but no one has ever done it this well, or in such detail.” --Davison M. Douglas
"A rich and engrossing biography of a courageous, pioneering litigator whose landmark contributions to U.S. civil rights law should be much more widely known than they are." --David J. Garrow
More information is available here.
