A new book by Michael Meltsner, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer, provides a personal history of the civil rights movement from the perspective of an attorney committed to social change. Meltsner’s writings bring to life a seminal period of legal reform in U.S. history. The book discusses famous cases and the turning points in the civil rights and death penalty movements. Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights notes, “Michael Meltsner has performed a great public service by recalling from his perspective as a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund how lawyers helped bring about social change during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This memoir will be of great interest to a generation unfamiliar with that remarkable time in American history, as well as to those familiar with the people and controversies he recalls.”
Meltsner is also the author of Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, the authoritative history of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s death penalty campaign. He is currently the Matthews Distinguished University Professsor of Law at Northeastern School of Law.
(University of Virgina Press, available April 30, 2006). See Books.
