The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer.

The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer. By Michael Meltsner. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, c. 2006. Pp. xii, 309. $34.95, ISBN 0-8139-2501-0.)

Michael Meltsner's memoir is a valuable resource for historians. Employing an insightful, participant-observer perspective, Meltsner offers an insider's account of how and why civil rights lawyering influenced Americans' struggle against institutional discrimination and arbitrary authority since World War II. It was and remains a struggle fought not only in the South but also throughout America. Meltsner grew up in a comfortable, liberal Jewish family in postwar New York City, learning to abhor ethnic and racial prejudice. This family heritage, along with the survival skills acquired on city streets and a visceral repudiation of McCarthyism, explains why, rather than follow other Yale Law School graduates into lucrative Wall Street corporate practices, Meltsner decided to join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) in 1961.

Much of the book focuses on the LDF's role in enforcing Brown v. Board of Education (1954). By the early 1960s it was clear that the Supreme Court's sanction in Brown v. Board of Education II (1955) of delayed public school desegregation "with all deliberate speed" engendered both the peaceful protest strategies associated with Martin Luther King Jr. and southern whites' violence-prone "massive resistance" in the name of states' rights and interposition. Meltsner's LDF-centered account provides valuable insight into these historic struggles. Most important, he documents how often King and his followers combined nonviolent protest and judicial vindication of constitutional-rights claims that the LDF won from a few federal judges like Alabama's Frank Johnson, federal appellate courts, and the Supreme Court. Meltsner provides numerous concrete examples of civil rights protest/ litigation "synergy," including the Birmingham and Selma confrontations, which resulted in Congress finally overcoming southern Democratic and conservative Republican opposition to pass, respectively, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (p. 91).

Meltsner suggests, moreover, how litigation and courts have been central to other American social-reform struggles. Much of the Warren Court's historic civil rights and civil liberties case law, as well as federal civil rights legislation, drew upon constitutional precedents legitimating organized labor's triumph in the federal courts and Congress during the 1930s, following decades of litigation and popular protests. In turn, the civil rights movement's victory over Jim Crow directly inspired further reform efforts empowering women, the poor, the disabled, prisoners (including those on death row), mental health patients, and others. The central point here is that since at least the 1930s, notwithstanding significant limitations, litigation and the courts have offered weaker groups the means to challenge dominant groups' control of legislatures, the executive, and local governments.

This impressive anecdotal evidence offers a strong rejoinder to critics of litigation who favor change achieved solely through democratic action. A conspicuous illustration is the contemporary argument that the Court's Brown decision mattered little if not at all; it is reinforced by Derrick Bell's and others' contention that courts have had marginal impact on alleviating the tragic maldistribution of wealth and power afflicting America's poorest people. Meltsner's evidence affirms a contrary view: even though litigation-driven reform may have had relatively circumscribed impact, the historical record demonstrates, sadly, that often it is the best American institutions can achieve.

TONY A. FREYER

University of Alabama