I have no idea what “writting onto the law review” means either. But I do know that liberal law schools like Harvard started placing blacks on law review that hadn’t earned it as part of their in-house affirmative action programs. And that ... coincidentially... Barak Obama magically made law review there soon afterwards (the first black to do so).
I don’t know if Obama was the first black to be on the law review period. He was the first to be “president” of the law review, which hitherto had gone to the top law student. The time had come, they decided, that they had to have a black president of the law review, and he was the top student among that subset. Apparently as president he didn’t do the work traditionally done by the president but let his underlings do that.