This is an insightful and important treatment of a little-known area of Thurgood Marshall's historic career. Part of the notable strength of this book is the solid familiarity with the issues of race and its contradictions laid down in Dudziak's previous work on the international scope of the American racial desegregation struggle.

Dudziak demonstrates that, notwithstanding Marshall's devotion to the notion of Black freedom arriving through the American rule of law in the just interpretation of equality rights through the American Constitution, pan-African influences indeed penetrated into the higher precincts of the American civil rights movement. Those precincts were, despite Marshall's centrality to the leadership of the NAACP, for largely cold-war-influenced reasons, hostile to such influences regarding American civil rights claims and jurisprudence. They were particularly hostile to W.E.B. DuBois' position that the African independence movement should be embraced as directly influencing the American civil rights struggle.

Dudziak uses the story of Marshall's invitation to join Kenyan/British negotiations over the drafting of its independence constitution to build a second historical narrative: one of comparative African/African American history of linkages, parallels, and differences between the Kenyan independence movement and the U.S. civil rights movement from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. She constructs this narrative through a comparative biographical approach since Marshall was embedded, held aims and loyalties in, and for a time physically traveled between both movements. This approach is more vivid in the earlier parts of the book, largely due to when Marshall's active participation in Kenya ends. The general narrative thereafter focuses on Marshall's role in the emerging dynamic tensions of the U.S. civil rights movement as he moves into the federal government and towards the Supreme Court.

Dudziak increasingly shifts her focus to Marshall's constitutional ideas in the context of evolving post-independence Kenyan policies. The transition is framed by the linkage activities of independence leader Tom Mboya, flashbacks of Marshall's ideas on constitutional equality, and his reactions to learning of shifts in Kenyan post-independence politics, for example, their treatment of whites and Asians as national minorities. Simultaneously, he was rising to meet— increasingly in governmental positions—the growing conflicts between his committed constitutional priority of equality and challenges to his stature in the American civil rights movement of the late 1960s.

The epilogue focuses on Marshall's almost bitter dissents from the Supreme Court, which was regressing from Brown v. Board's promise to uphold equal rights for minorities. Dudziak reflects on the perspectives and beliefs Marshall brought to his work in Kenya and his perspectives on the importance of his Kenyan work. She well analyzes how Marshall's ideas on equality collided with the more unequal authoritarian realities of post-independence Kenya. An appendix of Marshall's 1960 Kenyan Draft Bill of Rights is made even more useful by her careful source annotation of Marshall's rights provisions.

Marshall rode to his pan-Africanist involvement on the growing global post–World War II authority of the U.S. Constitution as a model of best governance in new, rebuilding, and democratically transitioning societies. It became such a model in part from Washington's sponsored availability of U.S. constitutional advisers to those societies, which ultimately included Marshall.

Where the U.S. Constitution went, so did its essential principle of equality. While leading the struggle to make that equality real for African-heritage people in the United States, Marshall carried that struggle to London and Nairobi trying to make it equally real for Kenyans. Like DuBois in different global contexts, for example, notions of self-determination and equality in the Versailles peace negotiations, Marshall insisted that equality took a back seat to no other constitutive principle or executive prerogative in its substantive applicability through the barriers of race to protect and entitle masses of vulnerable people of color.

As Dudziak shows, Marshall's belief that jurisprudential equality would lay the path to black freedom may have foreordained his subsequent disappointment with Kenyan leaders. Their overwhelming priority to build a post-independence state firmly controlled by its African majority included the unequal subordination of Kenya's Asian and white minorities.

Dudziak's book additionally contributes to Pan- African and post colonial legal history. She well establishes the deep concern and persistent leveraged strategies that the British employed regarding their former colony to retain maximum, indefinite control and influence over and within Kenyan politics and policy long following independence. These strategies included as much British shaping and drafting, of both theory and content, of the new Kenyan independence constitution as the Kenyans would lack the means and leverage to prevent them from accomplishing. This would be a frequent scenario mirrored in the independence negotiations for most Anglophonic African states. Dudziak's narrative challenges the widespread political image and structural jurisprudence that the first African independence constitutions were finally drafted by Africans to govern themselves as “national constitutions” by their own choices.

Dudziak narrates well the story of Marshall operating in this cauldron of race and colonialist leveraging, and doing so in drafting his bill of rights with considerable contextual awareness. She has given us an excellent contribution to understanding the international interests of Marshall as he bestrode the U.S. civil rights movement, thus leading us to new and valuable insights on the global importance of race and its comparative legal history.