Showdown ― Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America

A revelatory biography of the first African American Supreme Court Justice--one of the giants of the civil rights movement, and one of the most transforming Supreme Court Justices of the twentieth century.

Over the course of his legendary forty-year career, Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, fought for human rights and human dignity. Perhaps more than any other justice in recent history, he used the system to fundamentally change America. Wil Haygood probes Marshall's life on a personal level, recounts the dramatic five-day-long Senate hearing to confirm Marshall's Supreme Court nomination, and delves deeply into the most important legal cases of Marshall's career. And we meet the politicians, lawyers, civil rights activists, and others whose lives were intertwined with Marshall's, including President Lyndon Johnson, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (whose scandals almost cost Marshall the Supreme Court judgeship), and Harry and Harriette Moore, the Florida NAACP workers who died at the hands of the KKK. This galvanizing biography makes it clear that it is impossible to overestimate Marshall's lasting influence on the racial politics of our nation.


From the Hardcover edition.

WIL HAYGOOD is currently the Karl and Helen Wiepking Visiting Distinguished Professor in the School of Journalism, Media, and Film at Miami University, Ohio. For nearly three decades he was a journalist, serving as a national and foreign correspondent at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and then at the Washington Post, where he wrote the story, "A Butler Well Served by this Election," which became the basis for the award-winning motion picture "The Butler," directed by Lee Daniels. For his work researching Thurgood Marshall's confirmation hearings, Haygood won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the author ofTwo on the River; King of the Cats: the Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., (a New York Times Notable Book);The Haygoods of Columbus: A Family Memoir (winner of the Great Lakes Book Award);In Black and White: the Life of Sammy Davis Jr., (winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association);Sweet Thunder: the Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, (finalist for the first ever PEN-ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award); andThe Butler: A Witness to History, which has been translated into a dozen languages.


From the Hardcover edition.