They say
that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous
dissenter on the Supreme Court. 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.
But 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.
After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people
holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his
appointment to the Supreme Court.
At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing.
Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South.
Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the
Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate
labor protections. 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.
Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely
read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent
his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end,
Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal
and Civil Rights eras.
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.
Peter
S. Canellos is an award-winning writer and
former Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe and Executive
Editor of Politico. He is the editor of the New York Times bestseller, Last
Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy.