Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 26, 1993 TAG: 9301260483
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A FULL LIFE FOR THURGOOD MARSHALL
FOR AMERICANS too young to appreciate the fullness of his career, Thurgood Marshall is perhaps remembered as an aging Supreme Court justice, its first black member, part of a shrinking liberal minority, probably hanging on a bit too long in the hope of a Democratic president to nominate his successor.But others - and also, we suspect, posterity - will remember Marshall as a central figure in 20th-century American history. His death Sunday at age 84 marked the end of a life that in some respects was every bit as significant to the civil-rights revolution as the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr.
Ill health finally forced Marshall's retirement from the court in 1991. He had been a justice for 24 years, nominated by Lyndon Johnson and confirmed by the Senate in 1967. Before that, in the mid-60s, he had served as the nation's solicitor general.
All this, however, was only the second half of a long and distinguished career. The first half consisted of 30 years as a practicing lawyer - rising to prominence as the chief attorney for the NAACP in a series of cases that eventually brought an end to legal segregation in the United States.
Though not reared in poverty (his father was head steward at a posh sailing club on the Chesapeake Bay; his mother, a Baltimore schoolteacher), Marshall was reared in segregation. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania - all black students, all white faculty - and, because the University of Maryland Law School did not then admit blacks, law school at all-black Howard University. There, he came under the tutelage of Charles Houston, who had jacked up standards expressly to turn out well-trained lawyers for an assault on segregation.
Marshall opened a tiny law practice in Baltimore in the Depression year of 1933, taking on whatever clients he could. Many years later, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee, was to note that in deliberative conferences other justices listened to Marshall carefully, if not always in agreement, because he was the only one who had actually been the defense attorney in a death-penalty case.
King is widely and deservedly known for leading the nonviolent mass struggle for equal rights during the late '50s and '60s. Long before King, however, Marshall and his colleagues had set the stage with a series of courtroom victories culminating in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.
By challenging segregation first in the courts - rather than on the streets or in the legislative arena - Marshall and the NAACP not only influenced the commitment to nonviolence that endured for many years. They also established the theoretical base of the equal-rights revolution squarely and securely in the U.S. Constitution.
Marshall was a superb trial lawyer, but he also developed the long-range strategy that eventually won the day. It was a matter of chipping away, one case at a time, at the "separate but equal" doctrine that had held sway since 1896 - a matter of educating the courts to the realities of the old precedent.
Here, a ruling that states lacking a law school for blacks must open their all-white law schools to them. There, a ruling that separate facilities were so grossly unequal that the black facility must be upgraded or the white one desegregated. And eventually, in Brown, the frontal attack on the doctrine, and the court's reply: Indeed, "separate" for racial reasons is inherently unequal.
In Marshall's early years on the court, he was part of a majority that routinely took an expansive view of the Bill of Rights and of the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment. As new conservative appointees shifted the court to the right, Marshall became better known for his biting dissents.
Yet that shift hardly negated the rights revolution that Marshall had done so much to foster. For one thing, much of the action had long since shifted to Congress and the executive.
For another, the rights doctrines of the Constitution had long since taken hold in the country. The principle of equal rights may have emerged from constitutional darkness as an issue of race relations, but the principle had come to include such notions as equal rights for women and "one man, one vote" in legislative districting.
Marshall couldn't stay on the court long enough to avoid having his successor picked by a Republican president. That successor turned out to be the hapless Clarence Thomas - a sort of ironic worst-case scenario for the affirmative action that Marshall supported but that the court had come to view with suspicion and GOP presidents to dismiss (in theory, anyway) as quotas.
Marshall did live just long enough, however, to see a Democrat back in the White House. Amid all the talk of change and reinventing government, the new Clinton administration has before it an old task: To embed Marshall's equal-rights principles so firmly that affirmative action can die because there no longer is any need for it.