Stephen L. Carter, "Invisible"

Stephen L. Carter discusses his book, "Invisible", at Politics and Prose on 10/23/18.

When Thomas Dewey, the legendary New York City prosecutor and district attorney, went after organized crime in the 1930s, he selected twenty top-notch lawyers to help. All but one were white men. Eunice Hunton Carter (1899-1970), the team’s only black woman, turned out to be pivotal to Dewey’s eventual prosecution of underworld criminals, including Lucky Luciano. In his new book, Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale and the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, tells the life of his remarkable grandmother. The granddaughter of slaves, Eunice Carter graduated from Smith College and Fordham Law School. By the 1940s she was one of the most famous African-American women in the country. Yet despite her achievements she faced persistent racial bias, and her career was complicated by her brother’s membership in the Communist Party.

Stephen L. Carter is the bestselling author of several novels—including The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White—and over half a dozen works of non-fiction. Formerly a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, he is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught for more than thirty years. He and his wife live in Connecticut.

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Produced by Tom Warren