Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster By Stephen L. Carter Henry Holt and Company, New York, 384 pages, $30
The sage advice of Dr. Mae Jemison, the first black woman astronaut, is to “never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.” This is a recurring theme throughout Stephen L. Carter’s new biography of his grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter, who in the 1930s became the first black female prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and helped prosecute Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the boss of what became the Genovese crime family. It is a compelling book that tells the story of a pioneering woman who has largely been lost to history.
