Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American

by Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff is one of America's foremost and most passsionate writers about civil liberties and civil rights. In Living the Bill of Rights, he has taken what is too often thought of as an abstract issue and enlivened it by focusing on representative individuals for whom the Constitution is a vital part of life. As the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan told Hentoff, Americans need to know how :American liberties were won--and what it takes to keep them alive...and about the actual people who are not afraid to fight to keep on being free Americans." Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy underlined this need when he wrote, "The Constitution needs allegiance and loyalty and renewal and understanding each generation, or else it's not going to last." With characteristic eloquence, Hentoff covers the full range of American life in these inspiring and moving profiles and stories and portrays such fighters for the Bill of Rights as a high school senior in Tennessee who is born-again Christian; a black Texas lawyer fired by the local NAACP for representing a Klan wizard on constitutional grounds; Justice William Brennan himself; another Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, the preeminent; and a professional basketball star who, for religious reasons, would not participate in a display of mass loyalty to the American flag. Adding to the book's breadth are stories about such additional public and private heroes as Dr. Kenneth Clark, a resolute African-American school integrationist when more and more Americans, including some blacks, are abandoning that goal; a Jewish teacher at a black university who spoke out compellingly against black anti-Semitism; a young white mother who refused to allow anyone to stereotype her or her children by their color; a black high school student who did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because she believes there is not equal justice for all in this land; and finally, among other paladins of liberty, a Southern lawyer with clients on death row whom he will not abandon. In Living the Bill of Rights, Hentoff illuminates the basic necessity--and fragility--of our rights and liberties.

Genres: Politics, Law, History, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 23, 1998

About the author

Nathan Irving "Nat" Hentoff was a historian, novelist, music critic, and syndicated columnist. As a civil libertarian and free-speech activist, he has been described by the Cato Institute—where he has been a senior fellow since 2009—as "one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment" to the U.S. Constitution. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker for over 25 years, and was formerly a columnist for The Village Voice for over 50 years, in addition to Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and The Progressive, among others. Since 2014, he has been a regular contributor to the conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily, often in collaboration with his son Nick Hentoff.

Hentoff was a Fulbright Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in education in 1972. The American Bar Association bestowed the Silver Gavel Award in 1980 for his columns on law and criminal justice, and five years later his undergraduate alma mater, Northeastern University, awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Law degree. While working at the Village Voice in 1995, the National Press Foundation granted him the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award. He was a 1999 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, "for his passionate columns championing free expression and individual rights," which was won by Maureen Dowd. In 2004 he became the first non-musician to be named an NEA Jazz Master by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

Hentoff lectured at many colleges, universities, law schools, elementary, middle and high schools, and has taught courses in journalism and the U.S. Constitution at Princeton University and New York University. He serves on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.) and is on the steering committee of the Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press.

Reviews

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book focused primarily on the 1st Amendment, I can see it as the first in a series where each book covers a different amendment