Mary Dudziak book talk

Book explores Thurgood Marshall's ventures to Africa

Professor Mary L. Dudziak will discuss her new book, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (Oxford University Press 2008), on Wednesday, Dec. 10.

The event will be from 12 to 1:10 p.m. in the Faculty Lounge.

Exporting American Dreams explores Marshall’s ventures to Africa and his participation in the formation of Kenya’s first democratic government in the early 1960s.

Marshall already was a celebrated American civil rights lawyer by the time he made his African journey. He had argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court six years earlier. He went to Kenya searching for a new way to change society through law, Dudziak writes, and found it in his contributions to the new democracy’s bill of rights.

Dudziak details Marshall’s complicated engagement in both Kenyan constitutional  politics and the civil rights movement in America, where the sit-in movement started in Greensboro, N.C., in Feb. 1960.

“In his experience, in the U.S. and in Kenya, law was a way to move forward in a context laced with violence,” said Dudziak, the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science. “What we learn from both stories together is Marshall’s deep belief that for equality and full citizenship to be achieved, legal change was, for him, a critical component.

Read more here.