Happy 100th Birthday, Thurgood Marshall
As a young African American woman and the first lawyer in my family, I find Justice Thurgood Marshall's life both professionally and personally inspiring. But today, which would have been Marshall's 100th birthday, is not just personally significant. It is a day where everyone who is passionate about fairness and equality should pause and reflect on what we must learn from his legacy.
Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was a pioneer for legal equality who used the civil court system as a tool for change. Born in 1908 in the segregated South, Marshall experienced all the obstacles and indignities that young people today only see in documentaries and textbooks. But by the time he died in 1993, he had not only witnessed the dismantling of formal legal racism, he had actually played an integral role in achieving it.
As a young lawyer he worked to chip away at Jim Crow, combining sophisticated litigation strategies that earned him respect among colleagues, with a unique wit and humor that warmed even those most staunchly hostile to his anti-racist agenda. At the end of his tenure as a civil rights trial lawyer he had won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases. But speaking at his alma mater, Howard Law School, in 1978, he warned graduates against believing that the struggle for social justice would end with a few, or even many, courtroom victories:
"[I]t seems to me that what we need to do today is to refocus. Back in the 30s and 40s we could go no place but to court. We knew then that the court was not the final solution. Many of us knew the final solution would have to be politics. . . . So now we have both -- we have our legal arm and we have our political arm. Let's use them both. And don't listen to this myth that it can be solved by either or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved. You can't stand still. You must move. . . . "
Marshall's words could not be truer today. The battleground for achieving social justice through the courts has changed dramatically, in part because many people cannot even get past the courthouse door. My work involves researching and challenging the big business lobby's efforts to create rules that make it more difficult for people to file important legal claims against powerful corporations. The work involves a steep learning curve, a lot of time and effort, and an income nearly as modest as the same ordinary people whose legal rights I'm working to protect.
But as Marshall indicated thirty years ago, the work is important because the law's role in achieving a fair and just society has changed. The challenge today is to make the civil legal system work more effectively for those fighting for social justice through the courts; those who face the most daunting obstacles to obtaining it. This includes people like the low-income single parent fighting for child custody without a lawyer, the elderly consumer fighting predatory lending, and the hardworking employee fighting workplace discrimination.
Recent Supreme Court decisions have reversed much of the progress achieved over Marshall's lifetime. These reversals go by names like Ledbetter, where the Court made it more difficult for women to fight gender-based discrimination, and Exxon, which severely cut a punitive damages award against a company involved in one of our country's most devastating environmental disasters. These business-friendly decisions remind us that ordinary Americans still experience significant barriers to justice, although the battleground may not look exactly the same as it did when Marshall was a young lawyer.
While the fight for social justice today will entail different strategies than it did when Marshall was a young lawyer, Marshall's tenacity, creativity, and ultimate success achieving significant victories remind us of what is possible. That itself is cause to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, and reason to reflect on how we all, as persons dedicated to making our society work more fairly and equally, can further his rich legacy.
The author is Managing Editor of the tort law and policy blog, TortDeform.Com, and Civil Justice Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.
Thurgood Marshall, undercover informer for the FBI (you know Friends of Blacks Inc...or somehing like that). A real prince. Maybe we can make the day a National Holiday.
"Was Thurgood Marshall a FBI Snitch? Inquiring Minds Want to Know
Date: Wednesday, August 24, 2005
By: Gregory P. Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
Was Thurgood Marshall a “snitch”?
There’s no more appropriate way to conclude a discussion about black folks and the snitching phenomenon than to clear up whether that label can rightly be applied to the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, who is also one of our most cherished civil rights heroes.
Author Timothy B. Tyson first hinted that Marshall may have been a snitch in the book “Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power.” But what Marshall did in relation to Williams wasn’t “snitching” per se. Marshall suggested to the FBI -- which isn’t, never has been and never will be described as a government agency that is a “friend of the Negro” -- to investigate Williams so he wouldn’t encourage blacks in North Carolina to get rowdy.
Before going any further about whether old Thurgood was a snitch, perhaps I should explain who this Williams guy was.
Quite simply, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Williams was the baddest brother in the country. Badder than Martin Luther King Jr. Badder than Malcolm. Badder than anybody.
In late 1957, blacks in Monroe, North Carolina tried to integrate the city swimming pool. Ku Klux Klan nightriders drove into the black community looking to shoot up the home of one of the black leaders.
Blacks, led by Williams, fired back. That put an end to the KKK night rides.
Williams -- who was president of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP -- started his self-defense group by first getting a charter from the National Rifle Association, of which he was a proud member. Williams was a black liberal to my liking. Black liberals these days put the NRA on the morality scale considerably below the KKK and only slightly above flesh-eating zombies.
But after Williams visited Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the early 1960s, he became too red for most civil rights groups and the FBI. He had to flee the country to avoid trumped-up kidnapping charges.
Tyson said “it would be simplistic to dismiss Marshall as a red-baiting snitch,” that disturbing business with Williams notwithstanding. Okay, so what kind of snitch was old Thurgood?
Marshall’s defenders will no doubt claim that given the red-baiting that went on in the McCarthy era, the future chief justice was only being prudent in asking the FBI to investigate a chapter president suspected of communist sympathies. How then do we account for Marshall’s cozying up to the FBI in trying to discredit a black leader who was not only not a communist, but a capitalist to the bone?
Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard was a Mississippi physician and entrepreneur who was a mentor to Medgar Evers, who went on to become that state’s NAACP field secretary in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was Howard who gave Evers his first job after he graduated college. It was Howard who boldly helped Evers and others investigate the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and who let Till’s mother stay at his house during the trial of her son’s killers.
Howard was praised by most black leaders of America in the 1950s. But old Thurgood wasn’t among them. According to David T. Beito, an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama, Marshall “disliked Howard’s militant tone and maverick stance. Marshall became so alarmed by Howard’s support for a proposed march of a million blacks on Washington, D.C. that he secretly conspired with (FBI Director J. Edgar) Hoover to discredit him. According to an FBI report, Marshall had ‘no use for Howard and nothing would please him more than to see Howard completely crushed.’”
Howard is one of those unsung black civil rights leaders whose story deserves to be told. Beito has written a biography about Howard that is still in the manuscript stage. I tip my hat to Beito for wanting to tell Howard’s story. And I commend Beito for not skimping on the details about Thurgood Marshall as snitch.
OK, maybe “snitch” is too harsh a word. But for all the criticism Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has received -- he’s been called Uncle Tom, handkerchiefhead, lawn jockey and God knows what else -- it’s high time somebody pointed out that his black predecessor on the high court had feet of clay of his own.
Whatever sins Thomas has on his resume, collaborating with the FBI to discredit other black leaders isn’t one of them."
July 2, 2008 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since when did the 1950's FBI need a anyone, least of all a black lawyer like Marshall, to 'inform' on 'the need' for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to watch a black political activist?
Marshall was a great justice. Cite his work, the FBI informer stuff is gossip. Clarence Thomas work includes a 1992 case where he was the lone dissenting vote in a 7-1 decision. The case was of a black inmate, Hudson, who had this experience in a federal prison in Louisiana:
"Assisted by Woods, McMillian then placed Hudson in handcuffs and shackles, took the prisoner out of his cell and walked him toward the penitentiary's "administrative lockdown" area. Hudson testified that, on the way there, McMillian punched Hudson in the mouth, eyes, chest and stomach while Woods held the inmate in place and kicked and punched him from behind. He further testified that Mezo, the supervisor on duty, watched the beating but merely told the officers "not to have too much fun." " NYT
Clarence Thomas was the sole dissent, with Rehnquist and the rest saying this violated a federal prisoners rights. NYT link
July 2, 2008 11:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are quite wrong. His role as an FBI informer is well established as is his long time friendship and secret duplicitous working relationship with J. Edgar Hoover selling out acquaintances and activists whose politics he did not like. I understand you do not like these annoying facts; I do not like them either. But facts they are; and they are very revealing about Marshall's character. Martin Luther King and Paul Robeson are two of my heroes. They never conducted themselves in this way. The basis for the information about Marshall comes from the FBI files themselves received under FOIA. Even his most sycophantic biographers acknowledge his role as secret informer for the FBI. Even the most cursory search for Marshall's duplicitous role in selling out black activists and communists he deemed unappealing will find you a lode of material like the one I quoted above. My knowledge of Marshall's history includes his prominent role not only in going after Robert Williams but also his leading role in having the NAACP expel W.E.B. DuBois in 1948 and expunging references from that time forward by the NAACP towards Paul Robeson. Marshall certainly played a positive role in many important civil rights cases; unfortunately he played a very reactionary role in stifling dissent and contributing to the stultifying atmosphere of the McCarthy period which has ramifications even today.
July 3, 2008 8:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Robert F. Kennedy worked as an aide to Joe McCarthy. No one is perfect, Howard being a possible exception. I wouldn't believe everything in the files of J. Edgar Hoover, although Marshall may have been too close to Hoover. Marshall managed to operate with success in a racist government environment, and neither Robeson or MLK were actually inside the government. It may have been An Act of State that dispatched MLK.
July 3, 2008 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
of course you are right (absolutely right) about Robert Kennedy. I did not like him for that very reason. I do not think he ever repudiated McCarthy or what McCarthy did. Marshall did some very good things; I don't think it was not necessary to achieve the civil rights goals for him to be an informer. Maybe the FBI files are inaccurate. I doubt it but I hope so.
July 3, 2008 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm reasonably confident that I read in The New Yorker, in an interview about his imminent retirement, his response to a question about his replacement being black: it was to the effect that you could have a white snake, or a black snake... the inference being that character transcended racial considerations. Skipping forward to the confirmation of Thomas, it was easy to hear what Marshall meant - Thomas was quoted as saying things that were acutely familiar to me, having to work in a building with someone similarly predatory.
One of the tragedies associated with Marshall was the controversy of his final marriage to a woman who was not of African ancestry. We're moving past that, but we haven't seen the last of that grief.
July 2, 2008 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry for the confusion, y'all, but there are a few more comments here, on my individual reader post. One good comment about Marshall's involvement w/ Kenya.
July 2, 2008 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Kia, your writing is a model of beauty and clarity. Thanks for this piece of inspiration on this auspicious anniversary.
July 2, 2008 7:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ignore the comments from the one who only wants to shred Marshall's image.
Thurgood Marshall had an incredibly broad view of the inequalities in our society. Originally he wanted affirmative action to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds without regard to race. He clearly saw that issues of racism were only one (though certainly a major one) aspect of disenfranchisement.
Marshall was a hero to me growing up, along with Eleanor Roosevelt. Bush Sr.'s replacement of Marshall with Clarence Thomas was an incredible insult to Marshall's memory.
July 29, 2008 12:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I remember the quote (regarding the impending appointment of Clarence Thomas to the bench), "It doesn't matter if it's a white snake or a black snake; it's still a snake." I always think of that quote when I see what Thomas has (or really more to the point, hasn't) done on the bench.
July 2, 2008 6:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you, yes!
July 2, 2008 10:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Amen, amen!
July 7, 2008 9:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thurgood Marshall is the man who could have, and should have, been named by LBJ as chief justice. SCOTUS would have been a lot different.
July 2, 2008 11:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the reminder k1maynes.
Right on, socraticgadfly, but LBJ used up a hell of a lot of political capital -- real political capital, unlike this idiot -- to get the country to make the jump through equal rights, voting rights and schooling. Imagine the country if these had never happened. How much worse could it be?
Three cheers for Thurgood Marshall, his 100th Birthday, and the work still to be completed. God only knows this is still a racist and fractured country.
Good luck to you and all yours, Ms. Franklin.
Middle-aged, white, male, Brit, and angry at what I see.
July 3, 2008 1:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just saw the play "Thurgood" on Broadway. It was a stirring evening in theater, I recommend it to anyone interested in this great man's life. It's here until mid August. A great Tony nominated performance, beautifully written script, and yes, the "snake" line is there, along with a lot of other memorable quotes from Justice Marshall. It makes you long for true justice in our courts.
July 3, 2008 4:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
LOL...for some reason when I think of Justice Marshall the "I know obscenity when I see it" line jumps to mind.
Thurgood Marshall was a legal giant, trailblazer and inspiration for many. It has been 15 years since his passing (Where does the time go? I remember that day, sadly, like it was yesterday) but his legacy will live on for as long as America does.
July 4, 2008 10:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Aw shucks! Thanks a lot!
July 7, 2008 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Prior comment was meant in response to Big River Bandido.
July 7, 2008 9:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
We have conquered the uter space,but not our inner space aoc gold
August 14, 2008 11:37 PM | Reply | Permalink