Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights

The name Julius Chambers may not be as familiar to most readers as those of Thurgood Marshall or other leading figures in the legal struggle to advance the cause of African-American civil rights, but as Rosen, emeritus professor of law at UNC–Chapel Hill, and Mosnier, of North Carolina State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues, show in this first biography of this crusading attorney, he would “help change the face of North Carolina and the nation.” That Chambers was able to join the legal profession was itself a huge achievement. Born in rural North Carolina in the midst of the Depression, he attended schools that were deficient even by the standards of the Jim Crow South. But the young man was energized by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision opposing segregation, which to him “was the signal I could do anything.” Chambers’s accomplishments include becoming the first African-American editor of a white Southern law review, joining the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and challenging the racial order of deeply segregated Charlotte, N.C. Some readers may find Rosen and Mosnier’s book excessively long and detailed, but it’s an excellent resource for understanding how the civil rights struggle played out in less-heralded venues. (Dec.)