Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights by Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier (review)

In the remarkable opinion in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a wide-ranging busing plan designed to integrate the public schools of Charlotte, North Carolina. Chief Justice Warren Burger reminded local communities of their "affirmative duty" to eradicate "all vestiges of state-imposed segregation," even if it required some "awkwardness and inconvenience" for white students (402 U.S. 1 [1971], at 32, 15, 28). Swann constituted the Court's boldest foray into education since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and it paved the way for Charlotte and Mecklenburg County to become a singular success story in the troubled history of Brown's implementation. Charlotte-Mecklenburg soon garnered recognition as the most desegregated school district in the country.

Julius LeVonne Chambers, the Swann plaintiffs' victorious lawyer, was only thirty-four years old at the time, but he was already among the nation's most respected civil rights litigators. As a teenager in a rural hamlet shrouded by pine forests, he himself had been bused long distances—past the local whites-only school, with its gleaming buildings and impressive extracurricular programs—to an all-black school with shabby facilities and a meager, primarily vocational curriculum. Chambers hoped, he wrote in 1972, that desegregation might provide black children access to "'the great opportunity that America affords'" and that white children might come to recognize their new classmates "'as human beings with faults, problems, hopes and aspirations no different from others'" (p. 186).

In this celebratory biography, emeritus law professor Richard A. Rosen and historian Joseph Mosnier recount the extraordinary path that Chambers traveled from his childhood in Montgomery County, North Carolina, debating prices with customers at his father's auto repair shop, to the United States Supreme Court, debating the meaning of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee. Working tirelessly to overcome his inadequate high school preparation, Chambers excelled both in college and at the University of North Carolina's law school, where he encountered unspeakable hostility from white professors and classmates but nevertheless graduated first in his class. After an internship in New York with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), Chambers returned to Charlotte to establish his own law firm. Continuing to collaborate with the LDF, he and his associates litigated hundreds of civil rights cases around the state. In addition to Swann, the firm's Supreme Court achievements included Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), a seminal employment discrimination case interpreting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Rosen and Mosnier's telling, Chambers maintained equanimity throughout, even as his car was firebombed by segregationists and his law office was burned down by arsonists.

The authors write that they hope Chambers's life might serve as "an inspiration to future lawyers and activists" (p. 5). Although there is undoubtedly much to admire about Chambers, this approach leads to some missed opportunities. The authors present a relatively straightforward narrative of setbacks and accomplishments without an in-depth engagement with the issues of class, representation, and identity that legal historians such as Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Kenneth W. Mack have developed in a vibrant and growing scholarly literature on civil rights lawyering. Still, this meticulously researched book has much to offer specialists in civil rights history and anyone who teaches about Swann. The authors draw on dozens of interviews with Chambers and others as well as a thorough array of archival and secondary sources. Future historians seeking to complement the heroic narrative presented here with other individuals' and groups' perspectives on civil rights history in North Carolina will find this biography an indispensable reference.

In retrospect, Swann marked the high point of the Supreme Court's interest in meaningfully enforcing Brown. With its decision in Freeman v. Pitts (1992), the Court signaled that local districts...