A Story from the Border

Simple Justice By Richard Kluger Knopf, 823 pp., $15.95 Be it judicial tyranny or the vindication of the claims of Negro Americans, a revolution in constitutional jurisprudence or a return to the “original understanding” of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Brown decision of May 17, 1954, which overturned racial segregation in public schools, is a major event in a great story, and Richard Kluger is a first-rate storyteller. And as surely as there is poetry in Paterson or the Union dead, there is poetry in those momentous names from the heart of America: Plessy v. Ferguson, Gong Lum n. Rice, Hurd v. Hodge, Shelley v. Kraemer, Sweatt v. Painter, Brown v. Board. There is a kind of poetic momentum as well in the weighty words of lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, and defendants, whose personalities bear the indelible marks of region, nationality, city, or race: Spottswood Robinson, Thoroughgood (later Thurgood) Marshall, Waties Waring, Felix Frankfurter, Ada Louise Sipuel. This is a Southern story, but not a Southern story alone. Instead, it is a story of the American border—of Kansas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and the District of Columbia. And near the climax of the tale, North and South were joined as John W. Davis of Davis, Polk, whose constitutional principles were traceable to Jefferson but whose law firm was a pillar of un-Jeffersonian Manhattan, emerged from retirement to argue the case for the sovereign state of South Carolina.

So much has been written on the subject of race in recent years that it may be impossible to imagine how fresh and absorbing the history of the Brown decision is. It is history at once social, constitutional, intellectual, and political—the intersection of the American earth with the American mind. To read Simple Justice is to rediscover an America that was buried, so to speak, under the rubble of the Sixties, an America in which Negro citizens were

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Jack Chatfield

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Simple Justice By Richard Kluger Knopf, 823 pp., $15.95 Be it judicial tyranny or the vindication of the claims of Negro Americans, a revolution in constitutional jurisprudence or a return to the “original understanding” of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Brown decision of May 17, 1954, which overturned racial segregation in public schools, is a major event in a great story, and Richard Kluger is a first-rate storyteller. And as surely as there is poetry in Paterson or the Union dead, there is poetry in those momentous names from the heart of America: Plessy v. Ferguson, Gong Lum n. Rice, Hurd v. Hodge, Shelley v. Kraemer, Sweatt v. Painter, Brown v. Board. There is a kind of poetic momentum as well in the weighty words of lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, and defendants, whose personalities bear the indelible marks of region, nationality, city, or race: Spottswood Robinson, Thoroughgood (later Thurgood) Marshall, Waties Waring, Felix Frankfurter, Ada Louise Sipuel. This is a Southern story, but not a Southern story alone. Instead, it is a story of the American border—of Kansas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and the District of Columbia. And near the climax of the tale, North and South were joined as John W. Davis of Davis, Polk, whose constitutional principles were traceable to Jefferson but whose law firm was a pillar of un-Jeffersonian Manhattan, emerged from retirement to argue the case for the sovereign state of South Carolina.

So much has been written on the subject of race in recent years that it may be impossible to imagine how fresh and absorbing the history of the Brown decision is. It is history at once social, constitutional, intellectual, and political—the intersection of the American earth with the American mind. To read Simple Justice is to rediscover an America that was buried, so to speak, under the rubble of the Sixties, an America in which Negro citizens were