Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 25, 1993 TAG: 9301250138
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: AARON EPSTEIN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
MARSHALL PROVIDED COURT'S CONSCIENCE
Everyone knew, when he said goodbye to the Supreme Court in 1991, that Thurgood Marshall had done more to transform the lives of American blacks than anyone, except maybe Martin Luther King Jr.But what reporters saw that day was neither an living icon nor a remote jurist. They saw a crusty, street-smart, realistic, earthy man who was retiring because "I'm getting old and coming apart."
Marshall was the conscience of the court. He had never forgotten - and never let his white, well-off colleagues forget - that he knew firsthand the cruel sting of racism.
Despite the gains blacks had made under the law, Marshall knew the long struggle for equality was far from over.
Were blacks "free at last," a reporter asked Marshall that last day.
"Well, I'm not free," Marshall replied gruffly. "All I know is that years ago, when I was a youngster, a Pullman porter told me that he'd been in every city in this country, he was sure, and he had never been in any city in the United States where he had to put his hands up in front of his face to find out that he was a Negro. I agree with him."
As a civil rights lawyer, Marshall devised a legal strategy to use the Constitution's dormant promises as a sword to cut through one racial barrier after another, culminating in the 1954 decision outlawing segregation in public schools.
And for 24 years, Marshall the justice prodded his colleagues to do the right thing. When they didn't, he sometimes would thunder.
On his final day on a Supreme Court controlled by conservatives, Marshall released a bitter dissent that began: "Power, not reason, is the new currency of this court's decisions."
He was the first justice to attack the deliberate exclusion of blacks from juries in criminal prosecutions of black defendants.
Two months before he retired, Marshall bristled when the court amended its rules to allow dismissals of "frivolous or malicious" appeals by the poor. He wrote acidly:
"The court once had a great tradition: `All men and women are entitled to their day in court.' It will now read: `All men and women are entitled to their day in court only if they have the means and the money.' "