A review by mattrohn
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 by Taylor Branch

informative slow-paced

4.0

This is a book I'd love to teach from - extremely easy to read, provides good background on Marshall and his legal work for the NAACP LDF, and on Kenya's independence movement in the early postwar era, links the two, and touches on a range of perspectives through which those two projects interacted, both directly and ideologically. For just your own personal reading, if you're already familiar with the history of decolonization in Africa, and particularly with the legal history of the civil rights era, a decent amount of this book will be reviewing events that you're already familiar with, but it's a short book and the parts on Marshall's actual work drafting the Kenyan constitution is fascinating