Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America

A revelatory biography of the first African American Supreme Court Justice--one of the giants of the civil rights movement, and one of the most transforming Supreme Court Justices of the twentieth century.Over the course of his legendary forty-year career, Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, fought for human rights and human dignity. Perhaps more than any other justice in recent history, he used the system to fundamentally change America. Wil Haygood probes Marshall's life on a personal level, recounts the dramatic five-day-long Senate hearing to confirm Marshall's Supreme Court nomination, and delves deeply into the most important legal cases of Marshall's career. And we meet the politicians, lawyers, civil rights activists, and others whose lives were intertwined with Marshall's, including President Lyndon Johnson, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (whose scandals almost cost Marshall the Supreme Court judgeship), and Harry and Harriette Moore, the Florida NAACP workers who died at the hands of the KKK.