When it was released in 2000, Reference DudziakDudziak'sCold War Civil Rights made a major contribution to the understanding of civil rights, the rights revolution, and the place of rights in political and legal orders. While civil rights historians were long cognizant of the ways in which the civil rights movement played out on the Cold War stage, Dudziak's focused lens brought a deeper understanding of how geopolitical concerns in the second half of the twentieth century influenced America's rights revolution. With her latest work, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey, Dudziak would seem to be taking a closer look at an interesting moment in that larger “cold war civil rights” history: Thurgood Marshall's involvement in negotiations over Kenyan independence. While the book does tackle that subject, it even more interestingly uses Marshall's “journey” as a means of exploring the complex and intertwined relationship between law, violence, and social change.
As the fight for Kenyan independence escalated in the late 1950s, the British government called for talks with the nationalist factions about a “constitutional” transition of power. Nationalists invited Marshall, by then internationally known for leading the legal campaign against racial segregation in the United States, to advise them in these negotiations. As the first lunch counter sit-ins began in North Carolina in February 1960, Marshall sat in London arguing for inclusion of a bill of rights in the proposed Kenyan constitution. Marshall's draft, much of which did not make it into the Kenyan Independence Constitution, revealed the American lawyer's deep respect for the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, including the Reconstruction Amendments. It also showed the extent to which he was influenced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the constitutions of other newly independent nations such as Nigeria and Malaya.
Of note was the extent to which Marshall showed a dedication to the centrality of equality to the idea of constitutionalism. Of course, this should not be surprising, given Marshall's life experience as an African American in a deeply unequal United States as well as his career as an attorney making real the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of “equal protection of the laws.” Yet in Kenya, it was white settlers who would soon seek shelter in constitutional guarantees of rights, rights that would potentially help them retain claim over lands taken from native Kenyans decades before. One can imagine that Marshall might have shown less concern for protecting these oppressors. Nonetheless, Marshall fought to guarantee that all would enjoy the same protection of the law when majority rule finally came to the East African nation; that rulers would respect the rights (including property rights) of all citizens. When Marshall returned to Kenya following independence in 1963, he was outraged that the new government was not respecting the rights of all people, particularly those of Asian descent who had long been members of the community.
Ultimately, Marshall's involvement in the Kenyan independence negotiations occupies only a small part of the book. Dudziak uses his journey to tell two parallel stories of social change and liberation. In the United States, citizens were fighting in courts and in communities for equality. At times this took place “under the law” and at other times outside the law. Dudziak concisely weaves together the ways in which advocates for equality and freedom made use of legal action, civil disobedience, and violence to advance toward their goals. Marshall was skeptical, out of principle and practicality, of the efficacy of civil disobedience and violence in achieving social change. He was convinced that civil disobedience, “if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved” (p. 55). And he urged Kenyans to abide by the rule of law in lieu of violence. But in both the United States and Kenya, violence (whether used by advocates for change or those seeking to maintain the status quo) was a necessary ingredient. Kenyan nationalists looked to the United States's violent revolution against the British empire for inspiration in their own battle. And civil rights advocates looked to national liberation struggles across Africa as models for their own fight against white supremacy. Just as law so often requires the threat of violence to carry out its words, violence is so often required to change the words and practices of the law.
As it tracks this interlaced relationship between law and violence, Exporting American Dreams deserves a place in a growing body of scholarship that looks at that complicated relationship. Rooted most notably in Robert Reference CoverCover's essay “Violence and the Word” (1986), this vein of sociolegal scholarship still leaves much to be mined. While Dudziak does not engage this literature as one might hope, what she has provided is a narrative that can provoke rich reflections on the subject. She notes, “Perhaps the most important question was whether social change and violence were interdependent, whether one could exist without the other” (p. 64). The answer to the question lies in the pages of this engaging history.
