20 February 2007
Historian Discusses Thurgood Marshall’s Legacy in Africa
USINFO webchat transcript February 16
Mary Dudziak, a legal historian and contributing author to the U.S. Department of State’s online publication, Justice for All: The Legacy of Thurgood Marshall, answered questions in a February 16 USINFO webchat.
Following is the transcript:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
USINFO Webchat Transcript
A Bill of Rights for Kenya: The Legacy of Thurgood Marshall in Africa
Guest: Dr. Mary Dudziak
Date: February 16, 2007
Time: 11:00 a.m. EST (1600 GMT)
IIP Moderator: Welcome to today's webchat! You may begin asking your questions any time before and during the webchat. Just type your questions in the box below and click on the button to the right of the box.
Questions and answers will appear on the screen when the webchat begins in just a few moments.
Dr. Mary Dudziak: Good morning. Thurgood Marshall was a major figure in American history. He is widely known for leading a team of civil rights lawyers who brought cases to the U.S. Supreme Court that transformed American constitutional law. The most famous case was Brown v. Board of Education, which held that racial segregation in public schools violated the U.S. Constitution. He is also well-known as the first African American to serve as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall also worked with nationalists in Kenya in the 1960. This was very important to him, but the story has not been seriously studied before. That’s what I’m writing about right now. I’m happy to take your questions.
Question [maasai]: What kind of government did Marshall work with while helping to draft the new constitution?
Answer [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: In 1960, Kenya was a British colony. Africans were the vast majority, but had the least political power. Marshall worked as an advisor to African nationalists, who had been elected to serve in the colonial legislature, and had been invited to participate in constitutional talks. Their principal goal was independence. Constitutional negotiations were a path in that direction.
Q [maasai]: How has the constitution stood the test of time? (I lived and studied in Kenya a few years ago.)
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: The Constitution didn’t work in the way Marshall would have liked. He imagined strong, independent courts, in an American-style model. In Kenya, power was consolidated in the executive over time, and constitutional rights did not have the importance he hoped for. There has been a new round of debate over constitutionalism in Kenya in the past few years, however, which is of great interest.
Q [Jackie]: Do Africans think of Marshall as a hero?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: Many Kenyans I’ve spoken to were not aware of Marshall’s role. It hasn’t been written about in any detail before, in Africa or the U.S. Those who know about the early years of founding the nation think of him as someone who worked with their founders -- so I think they admire him because he was part of that era. Some may have mixed feelings about his work, since property rights for minorities (especially whites) was an important issue in 1960 negotiations, and land has always been a controversial issue in Kenya.
IIP Moderator: Dr. Dudziak is a contributing author to the State Department's new online publication about the life and work of Thurgood Marshall, view this free publication online (in many languages!).
Q [Guest]: As we know, the 1960s period in U.S. history was marked by segregation and the civil rights movement. There was certainly racism on the official level in the U.S. -- did Mr. Marshall face questions about this when he was in Africa?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: Yes -- especially when he returned in July 1963. Then he was an appeals court judge (not yet on the Supreme Court). It was right after violence against civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama had been covered around the world, damaging the U.S. image internationally. The U.S. government asked him to go to Africa. Marshall went to Kenya, Uganda and what was then Tanzania, and said that there were problems in the U.S., but the U.S. was working to correct them.
Q [Guest]: Related to my last question, did Mr. Marshall not think it was an odd contradiction that some of the rights he wanted to propose for Kenya were DENIED to black people in the U.S.!
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: That is a great question. He talks about it in his oral history. He says: "when you can do for the white man in Kenya what you can't do for the black man in Mississippi, that's really working toward democracy." He was basically trying to achieve rights that had not been accorded to his own people at home. That's why my book will be called "Exporting American Dreams." He took to Africa his hopes for equality in the United States -- trying to do elsewhere what had not been fully achieved at home.
Q [Jean]: Where do you think Thurgood would rank his deeds in Kenya in his life?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: This was something of great importance to Marshall. He talked about it all the time. After his death, when Chief Justice William Rehnquist eulogized Marshall in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, he devoted a paragraph of his short speech to Marshall's work in Kenya. So his colleagues understood that this was something he cared very deeply about.
IIP Moderator: February is Black History Month in the United States. Learn more about it at USINFO [Americas Celebrate Black History Month].
Q [Jackie]: What is Marshall's greatest legacy in the United States?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: Marshall's greatest legacy in the U.S. is probably his role as a civil rights lawyer, and the leader of a legal campaign that dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation in the United States. He was thought of as a great strategist. He lived a long life, and he should also be remembered for his important role in bringing an African American voice, and that life experience, to the Supreme Court.
Q [Jean]: Do Kenyans enjoy same freedoms that were set up back in the 1960s?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: Well, all the freedoms Marshall hoped to enshrine in the Kenya Independence Constitution didn't even make it into the final constitution. He had a very broad vision of rights. His nationalist colleagues, ultimately, were more focused on independence and governance of a region that had never been a country before. There were problems not long after independence with suppression of dissenters in Kenya and other new countries. Kenya's new constitutional story is just now being written. Kenyans have taken constitutional reform very seriously, and this story is still playing out.
Q [Guest]: Did T Marshall remain as a judge for his entire life? What type of schooling did he receive? And why did you become so interested in him?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: Marshall served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (an intermediate appellate court in New York) from 1961 to 1965. Then he was appointed Solicitor General of the United States by President Lyndon Johnson. The Solicitor General is the U.S. government's lawyer in the Supreme Court. President Johnson nominated him as a Supreme Court Justice in 1967. He remained there until 1991, when he retired for health reasons. He passed away in 1993.
I'm interested in the way U.S. legal ideas travel around the world, so that led me to Marshall's story. And I'm interested in civil rights history. But also -- he's just a very interesting historical figure!
Q [Guest]: Please tell me: how many other black high court justices have there been in the U.S.?
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: On the United States Supreme Court, there have only been two African American Justice. Marshall was the first. President Johnson was interested in promoting civil rights, and putting Marshall on the Court was part of his civil rights agenda. When Marshall retired, President George H.W. Bush (the first President Bush) nominated Clarence Thomas to replace him. Justice Thomas still serves on the Court.
Q [Guest]: Do you think that some universities attempt to abolish affirmative action in their acceptance policies will one day lead to the abandonment of Brown V. [Board of Education] and ultimately the return to segregation in the U.S.?
- Eva
A [Dr. Mary Dudziak]: The issue of affirmative action in higher education in the United States is a very important and complicated issue. Many believe that affirmative action is an important remedy for racial discrimination (in the past and present) which still affects American life. Others view affirmative action as a form of racial discrimination, because they believe that the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education is that all should be treated the same, and affirmative action allows people to be treated differently based on race.
The Supreme Court ruled in a recent case that universities could use limited affirmative action to achieve racially integrated student bodies. Many universities believe that is important to students' education. But the decision was very close, and the Court's membership has changed, so the future of affirmative action in education is unclear.
The controversy ultimately turns on what the meaning is of Brown v. Board of Education. Both sides of the controversy see themselves as pursuing the ideals of Brown. So Brown itself will not be reversed, and segregation by law is certainly something the U.S. Supreme Court, and the American people, will not tolerate.
Let me say something about why stories like Thurgood Marshall's work in Kenya sometimes don't get told. U.S. history has traditionally been framed by U.S. borders. And civil rights history has been thought of as a "domestic" American topic -- a story that happened in the United States. In recent years, historians have been taking the borders off of U.S. history -- internationalizing it.
So folks writing about civil rights history and Marshall's biographers in the past were writing within this earlier framework. The transnational story about Marshall in Africa is part of a broader literature about relationships across the Atlantic and other ways that the history of nations is in part a transnational history.
IIP Moderator: As we approach the end of our allotted 60-minutes, please send any final questions in.
Dr. Mary Dudziak: I have enjoyed ‘talking’ with you today. Let me end with a letter from Tom Mboya, a nationalist leader in Kenya, who had great promise, but was assassinated in 1969. He had invited Marshall to come to Kenya. After the constitutional conference, he wrote a letter of thanks to Marshall, in March 1960:
“I do not know whether it will ever be enough to write letters to thank you for your good work at the London Conference. But even if we do not, as you yourself said, you were glad to come home, we were glad to receive you home. I am sure I speak the mind of all of us, that you were the easiest man to work with, and that any of us who had apprehension before you came were easily disarmed as soon as we met you. Further the co-operation that we had from you has led to a greater understanding of the Negro/African problem.
I hope we shall play a bigger part in extending this friendship and relationship beyond the boundaries of just you and us.”
IIP Moderator: We wish to thank Dr. Mary Dudziak for joining today's webchat. The webchat is now closed. Please visit our USINFO Webchat Station homepage for more information on upcoming webchats.
For more on the life and work of Thurgood Marshall, please visit [our online publication].
(Guests are chosen for their expertise. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State.)
(end transcript)
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
