Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the book Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams (©1998 by Juan Williams).

Thurgood Marshall's lifework made him one of America's leading radicals. As a suit-and-tie lawyer, however, he was the unlikely leading actor in creating social change in the United States in the twentieth century. His great achievement was to expand rights for individual Americans. But he especially succeeded in creating new protections under law for America's women, children, prisoners, homeless, minorities, and immigrants. Their greater claim to full citizenship in the Republic over the last century can be directly traced to Marshall. Even the American press has Marshall to thank for an expansion of its liberties during the century.

But for black Americans especially, Marshall stood as a colossus. He guided a formerly enslaved people along the road to equal rights: Oddly, of the three leading black liberators of twentieth-century America—Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X—Marshall was the least well known Dr. King gained fame as the inspiring advocate of nonviolence and mass protests: Malcolm X was the defiant black nationalist whose preachings about separatism and armed revolution were the other side of King's appeals for racial peace. But the third man in this black triumvirate stood as the one with the biggest impact on American race relations.

It was Marshall who ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation, and voting, all of which overturned the “separate-but-equal” apartheid of American life in the first half of the century.

It was Marshall who won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools. The success of the Brown case sparked the 1960s civil rights movement, led to the increased number of black high school and college graduates and the incredible rise of the black middle class in both numbers and political power in the second half of the century.

And it was Marshall, as the nation's first African-American Supreme Court justice, who promoted affirmative action—preferences, set-asides, and other race-conscious policies—as the remedy for the damage remaining from the nation's history of slavery and racial bias. Justice Marshall gave a clear signal that while legal discrimination had ended, there was more to be done to advance educational opportunity for blacks and to bridge the wide canyon of economic inequity between blacks and whites.

Marshall was busy in the nation's courtrooms, winning permanent changes in the rock-hard laws of segregation. He created a new legal landscape, where racial equality was an accepted principle. He worked in behalf of black Americans but built a structure of individual rights that became the cornerstone of protections for all Americans. Marshall's triumphs led black people to speak of him in biblical terms of salvation: “He brought us the Constitution as a document like Moses brought his people the Ten Commandments," the NAACP board member Juanita Jackson Mitchell once said.

The key to Marshall's work was his conviction that integration—and only integration—would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once individual rights were accepted, in Marshall's mind, blacks and whites could rise or fall based on their own ability.

Marshall's deep faith in the power of racial integration came out of a middle-class black perspective in turn-of-the-century Baltimore. He was the child of an activist black community that had established its own schools and fought for equal rights from the time of the Civil War. His own family, of an interracial background, had been at the forefront of demands by Baltimore blacks for equal treatment. Out of that unique family and city was born Thurgood Marshall, the architect of American race relations in the twentieth century.

Thurgood Marshall lived to be eighty-four. He held high public office, but for those last thirty years of his life Marshall was reclusive, making few public appearances and rarely talking with reporters. The public knew him primarily as a distant figure whose voice was heard only in the legislative language of Supreme Court dissents. The combination of his reclusiveness and his standing in popular culture as an elderly, establishment figure blinded much of the nation to the importance of his legacy. However, given that Marshall laid the foundation for today's racial landscape, his grand design of how race relations best work makes his life story essential for anyone delving into the subject.