Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a “magnificent” (Douglas Brinkley) and “thoroughly researched” ( The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system’s most significant failures and most inspiring successes. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”-and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US.

Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South.

With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court.Īt first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.īut his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court.

They say that history is written by the victors. The “superb” ( The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.

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