The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America

Here is the quintessential American success story: a young African American boy from an inner-city neighborhood makes good and goes to Harvard Law School, then on to a promising career in a prestigious law firm. In Paul M. Barrett's unsettling The Good Black, however, the rags-to-riches formula goes terribly awry. Barrett's subject is his former college roommate, Lawrence Mungin. As a child in the all-black Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Mungin had learned at his mother's knee that he was "a human being first, an American second, and a black third." Hard work and good grades got him into Harvard. After several years as an associate at law firms in Atlanta and Houston, Mungin signed on with the Washington, D.C., firm of Katten Muchin & Zavis, hoping at last to achieve his dream of full partnership. What he got instead was the end of his career.

The facts of what happened to Lawrence Mungin are indisputable: demeaning work, insulting treatment, zero advancement; what is in question is why he was treated in such a way. When Mungin took his complaint to court, he claimed racial discrimination; Katten Muchin & Zavis didn't deny their mistreatment but insisted that, far from being racially motivated, it was simply the way the firm treated all its employees. Barrett, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, chronicles Mungin's life, his lawsuit, and the bitter aftermath of the trial in a book that raises more questions than it answers--questions about the American way of doing business that should trouble every American, white or black.