USC Law Professor Mary Dudziak has won a prestigious fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2006, which will support her book project, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey.
Dudziak was one of 60 scholars and the only law professor this year to receive a
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| Professor Mary Dudziak |
Dudziak, the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at USC, is currently working on her book about the role of law in the transition to independence in Africa, and in the struggle for civil rights in America. At the center of both stories was Thurgood Marshall.
A leading figure in American law and the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Marshall aided African nationalists in negotiations on an independence constitution for Kenya when he was a civil rights lawyer in 1960.
“He played an influential role in a conference held by the British government to draft a Kenya constitution, writing a draft bill of rights, and focusing especially on minority rights and property rights,” Dudziak said. “Scholars often ignore constitutionalism in Africa, but in the Kenya in 1960, constitutional politics provided an alternative to warfare. Marshall did not simply transplant American norms in this context. Instead, he brought a forward-looking vision of what he hoped someday to achieve in America.”
Dudziak added: “I went looking for Marshall in the archives, and I found an even bigger story. Groups in Kenya that had been killing each other fought instead with constitutional clauses. Meanwhile, the civil rights struggle at home took a new direction, and the role of law was less clear. In the middle of these dramatic stories was Thurgood Marshall, whose faith in law remained undaunted.”
Her book will be published in 2008, the centennial of Marshall’s birth, by Oxford University Press.
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