Denied the benefits academics could bring, Robert devoted his time to raising and racing horses and achieved great success as a “horse-racing impresario, gold rush entrepreneur, financier of Black-owned businesses, world traveler, state representative, and leading Black citizen in Ohio.” When both were children, their father was informed by the local schoolteacher that no Black children could be allowed into the school. The son of John Marshall Harlan’s father and an enslaved woman, Robert had a great influence on the Supreme Court justice, though their lives took completely different paths.

In addition to John Marshall Harlan, it also chronicles the life of his half-brother, Robert. The family owned slaves, supported slavery through the Civil War and opposed the 13th Amendment yet Justice Harlan still went on to become a prominent advocate for civil rights for Black Americans.Ĭanellos’s book is actually a biography of two extraordinary men. Harlan’s father decided his son should be a Supreme Court justice-and named him John Marshall after the famous Supreme Court judge. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.

Justice Harlan was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883), a bundle of five cases in which the Supreme Court held that it was constitutional for Congress to bar people from stores, inns or modes of transportation based on their race, and in Plessy v. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who lived through such periods of silence but was not silent himself. Canellos writes in his book, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero. “There are silences in American history,” Peter S.

John marshall harlan