Julius Chambers

Abstract

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. After blazing a unique path through the world of higher education, including becoming the first black student ever to be editor-in-chief of the law review at a historically white southern law school, Chambers was selected as the initial intern for NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s civil rights internship program. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked closely with LDF in forwarding the strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, with Chambers arguing and ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Aided by a small group of white and black attorneys and support staff which he gathered together in a truly integrated law firm, and undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its high-water mark. This book connects the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, the authors reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.