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Thurgood Marshall
Oct. 3rd, 2015 12:51 pmThe Times had an interesting piece on a biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall a few weeks ago.
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Thurgood Marshall sits in Room 2228 of the New Senate Office Building on July 13, 1967, a month after Lyndon Johnson has named him to the United States Supreme Court. Facing him are, among others, four arch-segregationist Southerners on the Senate Judiciary Committee: John McClellan, Sam Ervin, Strom Thurmond and its chairman, James Eastland. Marshall is determined to become the first black man ever to sit on the nation’s highest court. The senators are equally determined to block him.
[...]
Before that, Marshall had been a federal appeals court judge in New York, begrudgingly named six years earlier by President Kennedy after Marshall had spurned his offer of a seat on the federal trial bench. (“My boiling point is too low for the trial court,” Marshall had explained. “I’d blow my stack and then get reversed.”) That initial offer had come from Robert Kennedy. “You don’t seem to understand,” he warned Marshall. “It’s this or nothing.” “I do understand,” Marshall lectured him. “You don’t know what it means, but all I’ve had in my life is nothing. It’s not new to me, so goodbye.”
[...]
For much of that life, Marshall had been the founder and principal litigator of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fighting, against great odds and at enormous personal risk, to dismantle Jim Crow in Southern schools, courtrooms, lunch counters and voting booths — that is, when he wasn’t struggling frantically to spare individual indigent blacks from the electric chair or the rope. “Folks would come for miles, some of them on muleback or horseback, to see ‘the nigger lawyer’ who stood up in white men’s courtrooms,” an N.A.A.C.P. official would later recall. Not all of Marshall’s beneficiaries, though, were black: By helping to invalidate Texas’ whites-only primaries, thereby adding thousands of black voters to the rolls, he helped make Lyndon Johnson a senator.
-- David Margolick at The New York Times
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<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Thurgood Marshall sits in Room 2228 of the New Senate Office Building on July 13, 1967, a month after Lyndon Johnson has named him to the United States Supreme Court. Facing him are, among others, four arch-segregationist Southerners on the Senate Judiciary Committee: John McClellan, Sam Ervin, Strom Thurmond and its chairman, James Eastland. Marshall is determined to become the first black man ever to sit on the nation’s highest court. The senators are equally determined to block him.
[...]
Before that, Marshall had been a federal appeals court judge in New York, begrudgingly named six years earlier by President Kennedy after Marshall had spurned his offer of a seat on the federal trial bench. (“My boiling point is too low for the trial court,” Marshall had explained. “I’d blow my stack and then get reversed.”) That initial offer had come from Robert Kennedy. “You don’t seem to understand,” he warned Marshall. “It’s this or nothing.” “I do understand,” Marshall lectured him. “You don’t know what it means, but all I’ve had in my life is nothing. It’s not new to me, so goodbye.”
[...]
For much of that life, Marshall had been the founder and principal litigator of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fighting, against great odds and at enormous personal risk, to dismantle Jim Crow in Southern schools, courtrooms, lunch counters and voting booths — that is, when he wasn’t struggling frantically to spare individual indigent blacks from the electric chair or the rope. “Folks would come for miles, some of them on muleback or horseback, to see ‘the nigger lawyer’ who stood up in white men’s courtrooms,” an N.A.A.C.P. official would later recall. Not all of Marshall’s beneficiaries, though, were black: By helping to invalidate Texas’ whites-only primaries, thereby adding thousands of black voters to the rolls, he helped make Lyndon Johnson a senator.
-- David Margolick at The New York Times
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