Prof. Dudziak discusses new book on Marshall’s role in the democracy
—By Lori Craig
Prior to becoming the first African American nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall in the early 1960s took on a project—often overlooked by biographers—that brought him personal satisfaction and offers insight into his conception of the rule of law.
Marshall became involved in Kenya’s struggle for independence, providing the new democracy’s leaders with a draft bill of rights and encouraging them to strive toward equality under the law.
Professor Mary Dudziak explores this period in Marshall’s life in her new book, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (Oxford University Press 2008). She spoke about what she discovered during an event for USC Law faculty and students Dec. 10.
“Marshall’s story is often told in a way that’s very bifurcated: There’s Marshall as a civil rights lawyer; there’s Marshall as a Supreme Court justice,” Dudziak said. “But my book looks at Marshall in the 1960s as he transitions from one role to the next. And it’s in the context of that decade that he’s also heavily involved in Africa.
“Putting the international and domestic narratives together helps complicate our understanding of Marshall and of Marshall’s engagement with the rule of law.”
At the start of the decade, a wind of change was coming to Africa, Dudziak said, and African leaders preparing for independence negotiations were looking for American constitutional advisors. Through a group of American civil rights leaders, Marshall was invited to participate.
He made his first trip to Africa in 1960. One of the most evocative documents Dudziak examined during her research was a thank-you letter to Marshall from Kenyan leader Tom Mboya that describes Marshall’s feelings during that trip.
“Mboya wrote: ’As you yourself said, you were glad to be home. And we were glad to welcome you,’” Dudziak said. “And Marshall would later come to talk about Kenya as his homeland.”
In his experiences as a civil rights lawyer, Marshall came to see the importance of law in determining the conditions of life for blacks, Dudziak said. He saw law as a structure that held down African Americans. He believed that to achieve social change, the law had to be used as a path to African American emancipation.
That belief, as well as Marshall’s understanding of the courthouse as a place to work on social change, came into play in his work in Kenya.
“Marshall thought he was doing more than working with the process that was moving independence forward; he thought he was entrenching certain ideas—like equality—in a constitution that then would be interpreted and enforced by courts,” Dudziak said. “In some ways, that was Marshall’s Americanism sort of getting in the way: Americans taking legal ideas as law and often have as part of their conceptualization this idea that it’s through courts and judicial interpretations that constitutionalism gets made. And that was, for Marshall, a limitation of his ability to see how law might operate.”
In 1963, during Marshall’s second trip to Kenya, he saw a country in turmoil; its leaders were not enforcing the laws he’d written for them. While disappointed by what he saw, “it did not displace his utter joy at being part of Kenya’s founding moment, at being with the ones who helped carry the colony over this crucial, critical threshold,” Dudziak said.
He continued to see Kenya they way he remembered it, Dudziak said, even as its democracy faded and human rights abuses occurred. He continued to admire Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, despite Kenyatta’s compromising on rights. Yet Marshall wasn’t so forgiving of compromises made by United States leaders that left women, African Americans and others unprotected until the civil rights movement.
“Marshall doesn’t confront this conflict,” Dudziak said. “Instead, this is his image of Kenya that he carries with him to the end of his life, even as Kenya itself changes so drastically. He was a founder. That’s what was important to him. He could be something that hadn’t happened in his own country: A black man helping to found a nation.”
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