Bravery Before the Bench
Irons, Peter
Bravery Before the Bench THE COURAGE OF THEIR CONVICTIONS: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court by Peter Irons The Free Press. 420 pp. $22.95. "I'll take you all the...
...The author brings unique qualifications to these accounts: Between 1966 and 1969, after losing his own case in Federal court, he served two years in prison for resisting the draft...
...But then, wisely, Irons disappears and lets each individual take over...
...Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas NAACP, who rebuffed Little Rock's order to turn over her membership list, and Mary Beth Tinker, who in 1965 was suspended from school in Des Moines, Iowa, for wearing a black arm band protesting the war in Vietnam...
...But it is more than that: It is an uplifting reminder that courageous individuals can make a difference...
...I'll take you all the way to the Supreme Court, if I have to," is an old and honorable threat in America...
...I knew that I was not a good candidate for nonviolence...
...Most derived their politics from their parents' religious or activist backgrounds...
...I made up my mind immediately thereafter that I would not participate actively in another one," he recalls...
...Others include Lillian Gobitis, the Jehovah's Witness who refused in 1935 to salute the flag in school...
...He has a chapter on Daniel Seeger, who in 1957 challenged the draft law that forced conscientious objectors to swear belief in a Supreme Being, and he features Jo Carol LaFleur, who in 1970 as a junior-highschool teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, challenged a rule that forced pregnant teachers out of their classrooms...
...He does this competently, though he cannot forgo the occasional gratuitous editorial comment...
...Before each portrait, Irons sets the historical stage, explains the legalities of the case, and summarizes the court proceedings...
...Now a professor of political science and an active civil-liberties lawyer, Irons represented Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi in the landmark case that vacated Hirabayashi's criminal conviction for refusing in 1942 to go to an internment camp for Japanese Americans...
...But not all of Irons's choices are as well known...
...Irons has succeeded in presenting an immensely readable, grippingly human account of some of the important battles before the Court...
...others stumbled into their historical place...
...Robert Mack Bell, for instance, was arrested for taking part in a 1960 sit-in at a Baltimore lunch counter, and he says it was his first and last demonstration...
...Hirabayashi is one of the sixteen individuals Irons presents...
...Every one of the profiles is written in the first person, in the voice of the protagonist...
...These chapters are rich, vivid, often riveting, as the individuals come into focus in three dimensions...
...This book introduces sixteen inspiring Americans who made good on that threat and in the process broadened the liberties that we often take for granted...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
