| 
Little
Rock Boiled
(video)
|
There When We Needed Him
Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior
Judith Kilpatrick
A lawyer who answered the call
“Wiley Branton spent his life working for justice. He
represented the best of his profession and his country. There
When We Needed Him is a fitting tribute to a great man
and dear friend, and an important contribution to the writing
on the Civil Rights Movement.”
—Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Senior Managing
Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC
“Arkansas and America are better places because of what
Wiley did.”
—Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the
United States
Supreme
Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said of Wiley Austin Branton
that he “devoted his entire life to fighting for his
own people.” There When We Needed Him is the
story of that fight, which began with Branton's being one
of the first black students at the University of Arkansas
Law School and which took him to the highest levels of business
and government. From his private law practice in Pine Bluff,
Arkansas, Branton became, along with Marshall, counsel for
the Little Rock Nine in their 1957 efforts to integrate Central
High School. Under his leadership of the Atlanta-based Voter
Education Project, more than six hundred thousand black voters
were registered from 1962 to 1965. He later became executive
secretary of President Lyndon Johnson's Council on Equal Opportunity
and special assistant to attorneys general Nicholas Katzenbach
and Ramsey Clark. He provided leadership to the United Planning
Organization, the Alliance for Labor Action, and the NAACP;
and he was dean of Howard University Law School.
At Branton’s funeral in 1988, former Arkansas senator
David Pryor described him as “quiet and unassuming.
. . . It is his humility and desire to always put the goals
of the civil rights movement before self which probably accounts
for the fact that [he] was not more famous than he was.”
The influence of this quiet and unassuming man continues to
be felt decades later.
Judith Kilpatrick is a professor and associate
dean at the University of Arkansas School of Law. She has
written several articles about Wiley Austin Branton. There
When We Needed Him is her first book.
October
6 x 9, 230 pages, 25 photos, index
$29.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-848-6 | 1-55728-848-8
|
