JUSTICE RISING

A leading civil rights historian places Robert Kennedy for the first time at the center of the movement for racial justice of the 1960s - and shows how many of today's issues can be traced back to that pivotal time.

Bobby Kennedy was an unlikely civil rights hero. A cold warrior who once worked for Joe McCarthy, he grew up in a sheltered world where segregation was the norm. But when he became attorney general in 1961, he plunged headfirst into the politics of race. In this landmark reconsideration of his life and legacy, Patricia Sullivan reveals how he grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader at a tumultuous time.
Drawing on government files, personal papers, and oral interviews with many of those who worked with him, Justice Rising shows how RFK used all the tools at his disposal to confront violent resistance to desegregation across the Deep South. He pioneered the use of federal powers to challenge voting rights violations, intervened personally to desegregate schools, and championed criminal justice reform. The Justice Department under Kennedy became an incubator of change, where policy was imagined, tested, and put to work on the volatile frontier of race, crime, and the law.
In the wake of the Watts riots, when many called for more aggressive law enforcement in urban communities, Kennedy turned the spotlight onto white hostility and indifference. He insisted that all Americans address the root causes of the urban uprisings of the late 1960s: entrenched poverty, decaying housing, substandard schools, and a near total absence of employment opportunities. As a presidential candidate before his tragic assassination in 1968 he created a politics dedicated to bridging the nation's deep racial divisions. Deeply researched and compellingly written, Justice Rising offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of Robert Kennedy's role in the culminating years of the civil rights movement that sheds new light on the battles that remain.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and the author of Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era, and Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years.