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Dr. Myra Ann Houser
Ouachita Baptist University’s Dr. Myra Ann Houser, assistant professor of history,
has authored “Bureaucrats of Liberation: Southern African and American Lawyers and
Clients During the Apartheid Era,” to be released in September 2020. The book is published
by Leiden University Press as well as University of Chicago Press.
Built on research from Houser’s doctoral dissertation, “Bureaucrats of Liberation”
details the history of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Right Under Law, an organization
of lawyers founded at the request of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to fight for
public policy changes regarding civil rights in America. The book also covers the
organization’s Southern Africa Project, an effort spanning three decades to provide
support to Namibian and South African lawyers in their struggle against illegal occupation
and apartheid.
According to Amazon.com, Houser’s documentation of the Lawyers’ Committee and the
Southern Africa Project “provides a lens into 20th century geopolitics tied to anti-apartheid, decolonization, Cold War and movements
agitating against white supremacy. In doing so, it pays careful attention to the Project’s
different eras, beginning with U.S. Executive Branch officials helming the effort
and evolving into a space where more activist-oriented attorneys on both sides of
the Atlantic drove its mission and politics.”
Houser’s research on the Southern Africa Project and global anti-apartheid movement
spans a total of 13 years, as well as three countries on three continents. She studied
the American Committee on Africa papers, which are housed in New Orleans; the Lawyers’
Committee papers, housed in New York; the British Anti-Apartheid Papers, housed in
Oxford, England; and South African Liberation Movement papers, housed in Johannesburg,
Cape Town, Durban and Fort Hare, South Africa. Houser also interviewed former staff
of the Southern…
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