Thurgood Marshall’s Approach to Politics Still Deserves Respect
The civil-rights hero saw later black leaders as ‘a carnival, a distraction,’ says a biographer.
Thurgood Marshall outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Aug. 22, 1958. PHOTO:ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Jason L. Riley
Oct. 17, 2017 6:55 p.m. ET
81 COMMENTS
One of the final scenes in “Marshall,” a new film about the early legal career of civil rights superstar Thurgood Marshall, shows the future Supreme Court justice in a train station in Mississippi. It’s 1941—peak Jim Crow —and a large “Whites Only” sign hangs above a water fountain beside him.
Marshall ignores the sign, takes a paper cup from the dispenser, and draws water from the fountain. An elderly black gentleman quietly watches him, in seeming awe of this defiant act. The two men exchange glances but no words as Marshall exits the station, yet his message to the older man is clear: Don’t be afraid.
The cultural critic James Bowman has remarked that movie history is history for suckers, and that’s often the case. But “Marshall” gets a lot of the history right, even as it fudges details of the sensational trial at the center of the movie, which involves a black man who is accused of raping and attempting to murder a wealthy white woman in Connecticut. Marshall is a young lawyer for the NAACP who traipses the country representing black defendants the organization believes were unjustly accused out of racial prejudice. The movie is, above all else, a wondrous glimpse back at how a previous generation of black leaders dutifully went about the task of advancing the race and making America more just.
Marshall is portrayed as a confident, intelligent and fearless advocate who went about his work under the most difficult circumstances. He tried cases in courthouses with no bathrooms or water fountains available for blacks. His challenge was not simply to win cases but also to survive the aftermath. That could mean sneaking in and out of court buildings to represent clients and hiding his whereabouts when he wasn’t in court. It was not uncommon for him to be run out of town at gunpoint after a trial, or to have to resort to decoy drivers to evade lynch mobs.
Yet he continued to put himself in harm’s way for the cause. It is hard to square this kind of fortitude with black leaders today who become squeamish at the sight of Confederate statues or melt down over a “microaggression.”
“He was almost lynched once after a trial in Columbia, Tennessee,” Marshall biographer Juan Williams told me recently. “And there are other instances where people bring him into town in the back of a hearse so that it won’t be obvious that it’s Thurgood Marshall coming into town. And then they move him from house to house at night so you can’t tell where he’s sleeping.”
Mr. Williams, author of several black civil-rights histories, said black leaders of yesteryear obsessed over their public appearance and presentation: “How they spoke, how they dressed. It mattered to them.” Marshall frowned on the violent activism of the late 1960s and believed outward demonstrations of black self-regard and self-respect were essential to improving race relations. What Marshall and other civil-rights leaders of his era personified—and what “Marshall” celebrates—is what many of today’s liberal elites derisively call “respectability politics.”
People today who encourage underprivileged blacks to adopt middle-class mores are accused by prominent black thinkers like Michael Eric Dyson and Ta-Nehisi Coates of playing down the role of white racism in racial disparities. But an older generation of blacks believed that it mattered how they were perceived by nonblacks, not because it guaranteed protection from racist misconduct—it didn’t—but because it would help facilitate black upward mobility. In 2016, according to census figures, the U.S. poverty rate was 22% for blacks and 11% for whites, but it was only 7.5% for married blacks. Maybe Marshall’s generation was on to something.
Fifty years ago this month, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first black justice on the Supreme Court, but he’d already earned his place in the history books decades earlier. Notwithstanding his reliably liberal jurisprudence, many black activists in the 1970s and ’80s viewed him as a member of the conservative law-and-order establishment.
He didn’t much care for them, either, according to Mr. Williams. “Marshall was so contemptuous of the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons in the 1980s,” he told me. “To him, they weren’t seriously advancing the constitutional protection of rights, which is what Marshall was all about, and they weren’t advancing goals like better education or employment opportunities. He saw them as a carnival, a distraction.”
Sadly, the carnival continues and if anything has gotten sillier. (In August the NAACP urged blacks to “exercise extreme caution” while traveling in Missouri due to recent police shootings in the state.) But for anyone interested, “Marshall” vividly recalls a time when civil-rights activists and organizations deserved to be taken seriously.
Appeared in the October 18, 2017, print edition.
The civil-rights hero saw later black leaders as ‘a carnival, a distraction,’ says a biographer.
Thurgood Marshall outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Aug. 22, 1958. PHOTO:ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Jason L. Riley
Oct. 17, 2017 6:55 p.m. ET
81 COMMENTS
One of the final scenes in “Marshall,” a new film about the early legal career of civil rights superstar Thurgood Marshall, shows the future Supreme Court justice in a train station in Mississippi. It’s 1941—peak Jim Crow —and a large “Whites Only” sign hangs above a water fountain beside him.
Marshall ignores the sign, takes a paper cup from the dispenser, and draws water from the fountain. An elderly black gentleman quietly watches him, in seeming awe of this defiant act. The two men exchange glances but no words as Marshall exits the station, yet his message to the older man is clear: Don’t be afraid.
The cultural critic James Bowman has remarked that movie history is history for suckers, and that’s often the case. But “Marshall” gets a lot of the history right, even as it fudges details of the sensational trial at the center of the movie, which involves a black man who is accused of raping and attempting to murder a wealthy white woman in Connecticut. Marshall is a young lawyer for the NAACP who traipses the country representing black defendants the organization believes were unjustly accused out of racial prejudice. The movie is, above all else, a wondrous glimpse back at how a previous generation of black leaders dutifully went about the task of advancing the race and making America more just.
Marshall is portrayed as a confident, intelligent and fearless advocate who went about his work under the most difficult circumstances. He tried cases in courthouses with no bathrooms or water fountains available for blacks. His challenge was not simply to win cases but also to survive the aftermath. That could mean sneaking in and out of court buildings to represent clients and hiding his whereabouts when he wasn’t in court. It was not uncommon for him to be run out of town at gunpoint after a trial, or to have to resort to decoy drivers to evade lynch mobs.
Yet he continued to put himself in harm’s way for the cause. It is hard to square this kind of fortitude with black leaders today who become squeamish at the sight of Confederate statues or melt down over a “microaggression.”
“He was almost lynched once after a trial in Columbia, Tennessee,” Marshall biographer Juan Williams told me recently. “And there are other instances where people bring him into town in the back of a hearse so that it won’t be obvious that it’s Thurgood Marshall coming into town. And then they move him from house to house at night so you can’t tell where he’s sleeping.”
Mr. Williams, author of several black civil-rights histories, said black leaders of yesteryear obsessed over their public appearance and presentation: “How they spoke, how they dressed. It mattered to them.” Marshall frowned on the violent activism of the late 1960s and believed outward demonstrations of black self-regard and self-respect were essential to improving race relations. What Marshall and other civil-rights leaders of his era personified—and what “Marshall” celebrates—is what many of today’s liberal elites derisively call “respectability politics.”
People today who encourage underprivileged blacks to adopt middle-class mores are accused by prominent black thinkers like Michael Eric Dyson and Ta-Nehisi Coates of playing down the role of white racism in racial disparities. But an older generation of blacks believed that it mattered how they were perceived by nonblacks, not because it guaranteed protection from racist misconduct—it didn’t—but because it would help facilitate black upward mobility. In 2016, according to census figures, the U.S. poverty rate was 22% for blacks and 11% for whites, but it was only 7.5% for married blacks. Maybe Marshall’s generation was on to something.
Fifty years ago this month, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first black justice on the Supreme Court, but he’d already earned his place in the history books decades earlier. Notwithstanding his reliably liberal jurisprudence, many black activists in the 1970s and ’80s viewed him as a member of the conservative law-and-order establishment.
He didn’t much care for them, either, according to Mr. Williams. “Marshall was so contemptuous of the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons in the 1980s,” he told me. “To him, they weren’t seriously advancing the constitutional protection of rights, which is what Marshall was all about, and they weren’t advancing goals like better education or employment opportunities. He saw them as a carnival, a distraction.”
Sadly, the carnival continues and if anything has gotten sillier. (In August the NAACP urged blacks to “exercise extreme caution” while traveling in Missouri due to recent police shootings in the state.) But for anyone interested, “Marshall” vividly recalls a time when civil-rights activists and organizations deserved to be taken seriously.
Appeared in the October 18, 2017, print edition.
