Transcripts For CSPAN3 Thurgood Marshall As A Civil Rights Lawyer 20240712

Historic and they focus on justice marshals time at the naacp attorney trying the education related segregation cases such as around the board of education. This is hosted by the National Museum of African American history and culture. Good evening. My name is dear trey cross, director of programs at the National Museum of African American history and culture. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you to this Wonderful Program and introduce you to our discussion entitled, historically speaking, thurgood marshall. An evening with spencer crew and paul think women. Before we begin, let me also welcome our audience who is streaming the discussion through the museums you stream channel. A twitter handle this evening is hashtag historically speaking. We are also thrilled that this program will be broadcast via cspan book tv and will be aired at a later date. To begin, dr. Cruz compelling new biography introduces us to the constant battles for equality faced by African Americans through a study of Thurgood Marshalls extraordinary courage and his belief and the power of the law to change society. Thurgood marshall follows his career from his youth and baltimore, maryland, to his days as a Supreme Court justice. Thurgood marshalls inspiring story illustrates how pervasive is racism in American Society and also really reveals the difficulty of the struggles of African Americans to make progress against it. Through the lens of marshals life, we learned the importance of perseverance and resilience. Hence, marshals narrative is one that finds its place among the many stories of the historic figures that you find in our galleries. Now, a word about tonight speakers. Spencer crew isy serving as the interim director of the National Museum of African American his real culture. He also curated one of the museums inaugural exhibitions, entitled defending freedom, defining freedom, the era of segregation, focusing on they civil rights struggles of the time, demonstrating how africanamericans not only survived the challenges set before them but crafted an Important Role for themselves in the nation. Anne among them he has served first as the president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom center for six years and he worked at the smithsonian National Museum of american for 20 years. Nine of those years he served says that museums director and and each of these institutions he has fought to make history accessible to the public through innovative hand exclusive is additions and public programs. His most ex important exhibition was the groundbreaking field to factory African American in immigration from 1915 to 1940, generating a National Discussion about migration, race and historical exhibitions. I might add, for those of us that are coming into the field 30 or so years ago, we actually found a place for ourselves and museums across the country, the impact of the exhibition is so important and not to be forgotten in that aspect. He also curated the american presidency, a glorious burden which remains one of the smithsonians most popular exhibitions. And National Underground Railroad Freedom center has attracted worldwide attention because of the quality of the exhibitions and focus on race, interracial cooperation, and issues of contemporary slavery. Crew has published extensively in the areas of the African American and public history as well. Among his publications are black lives in secondary cities, a comparative analysis of the black communities of canton and elizabeth new jersey, 1860 to 1920. He wrote in 1993. He coauthored the american presidency, a glorious burden in 2002, and unchained memories, ratings from the slave narratives, also written in the same year. Crew it is an active member of the academic and Cultural Community serving on main boards that worked generate enthusiasm for history among the general public. He is the past chair of the National Council for history, education, and serves on the board of the National Trust for historic preservation, as well as the nominating board of the organization of american historians. Interviewing doctor crew this evening, is doctor paul finkelman, the oldest of the oldest independent institution of jewish learning in the United States. He has held a number of chairs as a tenured professor and visitor, including the chair of human rights law at the university of saskatchewan, the John Hope Franklin chair at duke law school, and the president William Mckinley distinguished professor at albany law school. In 2017 he held the fulbright chair in human rights and social justice at the University Ottawa school of law and was the john lee merritt visiting professor at the university of Pittsburgh School of law. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than 50 books. His most recent supreme injustice, slavery in the nations highest court was published by howard i am sorry. Excuse me. Harvard University Press in 2018. Please join me in a warm welcome for dr. Spencer crew and doctor paul i finkelman. [applause] good evening, paul. Good evening, spencer. We have and friends for a long time, im a little nervous. Its great to be here at in this amazing building with this amazing collection, here to educate all americans on parts of our past that most americans dont know enough about. It is an important place. I feel very fortunate to be. Here i think what were trying to do is talk about American History seen through the African American lands. To understand how influential it is new history of this country, the more that we do that, the better informed the public will be. I agree. I did my phd coffee with the great African American general franklin. My sense is that American History is the history of afro, euro, native americans, and then later Asian Americans and other americans, and is while we have a museum for African American history, this is the museum of america. And so those of you who have not gone through the museum pm, or just here to here is in public, he should come back to see the whole museum. It is really spectacular. Pierre you have to be here more than one day. Scheduled this for several days and keep coming back. We will be glad to have you. I should add that John Franklin was the head of this creation of the museum, head of the scholarly he wants to make sure we tell the unvarnished truth. That is what this museum tries to do, to tell a truthful story. Sometimes it is painful. But the truth is the core but we try to do to make sure people understand. Let us start with the truth about the third of martial. He passed a little bit more than a quarter of a century ago. There are probably significant numbers of people in the United States who know nothing about him other and that he was on the Supreme Court. And so i think that the first place to start is, who was he . Give us the short and very quick story. Who is this man that we are here to talk about today . As you said, the memories that most people have about marshall is that he was on the Supreme Court, the first African American on the Supreme Court. It is an important benchmark in his life, but i think it is the benchmark on the tail end of his real fame. The importance of martial released hymns from his work prior to that, when he was probably leading civil rights voice in this country throughout the thirties, forties, fifties and into the sixties. I think that who marshall was, was an architect of the change of the legal structure of this nation to make it more in balance with the words and the ideas and principles of the constitution of the declaration of independence. It is through his work through the courts that he began to change that. He says the rules are the rules. To make the rules work the right way, you can really begin to create a more balanced and better way of living for all americans, not just a few. I think marshall is the person who believed in quality. He believed in protecting the rights of the poor. Protecting the rights of people of color and protecting the rights of those who are being mistreated by the nation, because they dont have wealth or the kind of influence that they need. Eat his work in that area really changes the nature of the nation and allows us to experience what we are able to experience today. How did he get there . Where does he come from . How come he has such a weird first name . Marshall grows up not too far from baltimore, maryland. His family has lived there for quite a long time. Actually, his first name was thorough good marshall. Named after his grandfather. He decided that in sixth grade he did not like that name. He said it was too hard to pronounce, so he started calling himself thurgood. It may be unusual, but not any more unusual than thorough good. The unusual thing and getting that name from his grandparents is the history the passed down with him, that his grandparents on both sides were very active in the community of the African American community. They were agitators for change and fair treatment. They passed that down to him. It spurred his work in the area along with his mother and father. They demanded at the dinner table, when they had conversations, they demanded that their children tell the truth, saying that if they were going to have an idea, they have to have read the papers and they had to know the information and they had to put together a cogent rationale for what they were talking about. Marshall claims that he was training to be a lawyer and knew he was going to be a lawyer because his father and mother made them think about the world in which they lived and how to talk about it in a clear way. I think they had that idea of how to navigate the world from his ancestors, his grandparents and parents on both sides. They were critical to creating the man who becomes a lawyer for the naacp. Marshall has a connection to philadelphia, the greater philadelphia. He does. He goes to Lincoln University again, greater philadelphia. Okay. laughs its close. John its like a hometown club. Like the university of marylands greater washington, d. C. . I guess that sort of true. But the connection is that lincoln has a group of friends and they enjoy playing cards. The enjoy each Others Company and they enjoyed going into philadelphia on the weekends to see the town. And to go to the churches where they thought the prettiest girls were there. One of his ventures into philadelphia, he meets the woman who becomes his wife. He claims he did not meet her until several years later, but she claims she actually met him at an event at a party and he was so busy talking to everyone else, he did not notice her, but she noticed him and decided he was someone she wanted to get to know better. That connects him to philadelphia. Thats important. As w. Sea fields said, id rather be in philadelphia. So, he wants to go to law school. He is a citizen of maryland. Does he go to the university of Maryland Law School . He wants to go to that university, but the Maryland Law School had stopped accepting African American students there in the late 19th century. He decides to apply and he understands that it might be difficult, the decides to apply anyway and he gets the standard letter back, that they dont allow African Americans to go to the school here, and that there are other wonderful schools in the area. You might want to try them. We might even provide you with some money to go somewhere else in the state. He decides that he cannot afford to do that. He does not want to go to maryland and winds of actually having to go to Howard University instead. What is interesting about that is when he first goes to Howard University, the reputation is not very strong. In fact, it was only a night school, law school, which meant that it was set up that for individuals who had to work during the day to go to law school at night and then become lawyers. But the standards were not very high. The demands are not very high. He sort of reluctantly decided to go to howard because he could go there at night and werent during the day. But what happens is when he gets there, they also brought on board a new dean of the law school. Charles hamilton houston. Houston has decided that he is hired to buffer and build up a law school at Howard University. He decides that he needs to do is change the way it operates. The biggest change he makes is from a night school to add a school. You can imagine how they might have decided to do that. Even though it was a night, School Highly regarded, it provided a pathway to a different for a number of different individuals in washington, d. C. , who worked at night and became. Lawyers in fact, his father got his lot agree that. Way deciding to change it from a night school to a day, school a fulltime law school, he was actually going against what has been a pathway of his father to his law profession. But his belief was that he needed to make howard a much stronger place. It has to be a place that became the premier place to educate African American lawyers. He had a vision for the future. His vision was that he wanted to create lawyers who would look at the society, look at the laws we called social engineers. The tactic was to change the nature of the laws. The nature of the environment in which African Americans had to live. To make it a better place, and equitable place for people to live. Going to law school was, i think marshal at first was unhappy about the choice. It turns out to be one of those moments in time where you think is that it turns out to be the best choices that you. Make so he is famous for having said to all of his students that if a lawyer is not a social engineer, he is a parasite. Absolutely. We know what a parasite is. What is a social engineer . A social engineer is a lawyer who dedicates his career to changing society, to reengineering society from that time. The laws were there in terms of constitution and other pieces of the law that existed, but they needed to be forced to be applied in an equitable kind of way. So the lawyers he trained at howard had the task of taking a law degree, not using it to make it for themselves, but using it as a tool to begin to change the nature of that society. To look at the laws and use them to have them applied equally, and to make sure that in the long run Society Changes in a way that African Americans and others who find themselves on the short side of the law are able to actually use and be citizens by the full definition of that word. For them, social engineering was reengineering the society to be more equitable. Let us for a moment go back to the early 19 thirties, when Young Thurgood marshall was and law school. There are many people here who probably own durst and what the conditions and the United States were light for African Americans in the 1930s. There are also people who only know it as a vague history, because they have not gone to the museum yet. What is the world that Thurgood Marshalls going into . That is the centerpiece of what his life will be lake, is to completely dismantle that world and turn it upside down. What is the world to understand what he does, we have to understand what he is up against. As i said, marshall is raced in baltimore, maryland. To give you a sense of it, there was a study done around that time in which they looked at segregation throughout the nation, and they decided that the most segregated town in the country was baltimore. First of all, you get a sense of how strong the laws were to segregated the races in baltimore. He grows up in a segregated society, when in which African Americans were not allowed to go to neither downtown stores, not allowed to get jobs in those stores. They could only get housing and certain parts of the city. The laws had set in place to prevent certain groups from living in certain parts of the city. The earliest ones were created in baltimore. He really are in a place where African Americans are pushed towards the bottom part of the society. This is emblematic of what it is like throughout the south and parts of the north in terms of the opportunities of African Americans to get jobs. Its very much limited. Opportunities to go to school is very much limited. Schools are segregated. Separate but equal meant separate but unequal in terms of what was provided for African Americans in terms of schools and facilities. In terms of places they could go to visit where they had to sit in theaters. So that it is a world in which the structure is set up to prevent African Americans from experiencing their full right to citizenship. I think that is the world that marshall was born into. It was a world in which his parents and grandparents are fighting against. Others around him are fighting against it and the world he is looking to change is a social engineer. So you have a world where literally, African Americans are segregated from when they were born in an allblack hospital, and they are buried in an allblack cemetery. Everything in between is segregated. Right. It is by law in 17 states. It is by custom in some other states. The customs vary from state to state. The laws are very harsh. Some of the states, one who reads the laws and you get the impression that state legislators spend weeks trying to find something new to segregate, so that at one point the four maliciously sure says that at the end of the school year, the books from black schools must go to one warehouse and the books from white schools must go to the other. Maybe they thought these books with date over the summer if they were in the same warehouse. In some places, if you went to court there was a black bible and a white bible you could swear on. Those are the kinds of differences and there were places where the tax rolls, there was a book for black taxpayers and white taxpayers. It is almost a constant contest. What else can we segregate . In this world, it is gigantic world of racism everywhere. Where does marshall see the crack in the wall . How does he see a bethany have bridging through this gigantic wall of segregation which is everywhere . I think theres two pathways. First of all, i think he believes that through the law, you can create change. Part of what he is trying to do is to help to, i think shift the way that the courts are interpreting the law in ways that might be more equitable, it might be fair and treatment. Riyadh what they also do that he and others in the naacp crafted an interesting approach to attacking segregation. The approach is that big its important for Supreme Court cases, like placebo since ferguson, 1896. I always get that when mixed up with Frederick Douglas and in 95. The death of douglas is the end of when age. Plus see versus ferguson is the beginning of the next stage. With four plus events is ferguson and what it essentially does is that its a separate but legal, remaining in application, separate but unequal becoming the norm. What they decide to do is go back to the original court ruling that says separate but equal is legal. But what they decide to do is launch an attack in which they want to make it in fact, separate and equal. Wherever you have these different kinds of settings and different kinds of schools for African Americans and white children. If the facilities are not equal the idea is to force them to live up to the law and to make them equal. The undercurrent of this is they think that it will be so expensive to create to equal systems that it will force the powers that be to decide it is too expensive and bring them together. The hope is that by forcing things to actually be separate but equal, according to the law, that they will create a crack in the system of separate but unequal, and making desegregation a financial logic for those places. What are some of the week in the strategy . They started at first in the law schools and they believed, lets start high. If they start an elementary school, they would probably drive people crazy and will never get any it will create such a wave of resistance. So lets start with professional schools and they started with a case in missouri with a guy by the name of gains in which she applies to law school and makes the argument that separate but unequal is unfair. They get the ruling over a couple several months, over a couple years. He goes off to school in michigan. When they finally get the ruling that they, want gains has disappeared and they cannot figure out what has happened to him. We never do find out what happens to gains. There are all kinds of theories. Some is that he never came back from the drugstore. Others think that maybe he was murdered. Others think he was paid off. Others thought he just decided he did not want to put up with the sunny longer. The problem is that the naacp and marshall had gone through so many steps to get the ruling for the court in their favor that when he disappears, they do not have someone to actually follow up, which means they have to start the case all over again. But then there was a case in oklahoma, but as we talked earlier, probably the most important case was in texas, where they get a man who votes for the post office. He works for the post office. He agrees to go to the process of applying to the law school in texas. Texas comes up with a number of different steps along the way, in which first there is a resistance going there altogether. They then decide theyre going to create a separate law school for him, where he can go to law school and where he can actually quickly assemble a library, books and a teacher to say now we have a law school that a separate and equal. But he refuses to accept that as does marshall instead of saying this is not equal, this you dont get the same kind of benefits or connections. This separate school should go to the university of texas. They continue to litigate it to finally where they when the case, in which the Supreme Court argues that separate school does not give you the same experiences, the same contacts, the same or you have on the most important people come in us teachers, alumni, creating that works for you to become successful. They say that you cannot do that in a separate school with two or three teachers and one librarian. Its ruled against texas. This creates that important crack in terms of pushing the idea that separate but equal had to be separate and equal. This creates a lot of panic and a lot of concern and a lot of schools. This side note this is that when this is successful, it is also successful in oklahoma. It is not just in the law school or happens. Then it begins to happen in the school of education and other places. Then the next big step is that the student is accepted i think in oklahoma, and he decides that he wants to live on campus. So on and it got to figure out where is he going to stay. He says ive got a little piece of paper that says i have a dorm room and so now we have to figure out what to do with that and other students come and want the same things. Now weve got to figure out where were going to put all the students . On top of it, they did not have the nerve to participate in the social, of the Football Games at the schools. It creates more turmoil. That is part of what was underlying the 80th that martial he wants to begin to have people to have access and wants to create a movement in that direction that is going to break apart the whole idea of separate and equal and show that in fact, people can operate and live together and it will not cause a tremor in society along the way. In the texas case, i think thats an important first step in attacking the idea of separate and unequal and trying to be equal operate so that it will be people beginning to actually mix together and find that it is not so terrible. There is a story that when marshall was litigating the texas case, and texas said they were going to separate law school for black people. Marshall said fine, we have somebody who wants to study petroleum engineering. Are you going to spend the money to create a college for an African American . They went to graduate schools, then they attacked the Public Schools. Im sure that everybody here knows the outcome. It is brown v. Board where the Supreme Court unanimously holds that separate but equal schools are inherently unequal. That they could never be equal. This makes marshall, in my view, the central figure of the civil rights for the 20th century. Then without marshall there is no montgomery bus boycott. Because the montgomery bus boy body boycott is coming off of this huge victory in brown where the Supreme Court is essentially saying segregation is not constitutional. In brown, the court says, this only applies to the schools. It is not applied everything else, but anybody who has half a brain knows that this is the beginning of the end. So, in that context there are some African Americans who are very uncomfortable with this. They are saying, you are destroying our world. We would be better off. You can some of the Southern States are saying, we are going to raise allocations. We will raise teacher salaries and build Better Schools. We will make separate schools equal. Some African Americans are arguing that it would be better for our children right now to go to a Better School than to litigate and fight and face trauma for a decade or more to get them into an integrated school. Some districts in virginia simply shut down their schools. They said we do not have to have Public Schools if we have to integrate. We will simply close them down. So my question is, and by the way the same thing occurs so that check europe incentives a great hero of america, but Jackie Robinson leads to the end of a very viable African American business known as the negro leagues. Once baseball is integrated, you dont need these separate leagues. We are about out of time. Our moderator is waving at a silently. One last question, if we could bring back third of martial and say, mr. Marshall, or mr. Justice marshall, because i think you would say that being a Supreme Court justice was the crown on his career, but his career was in the trenches. If we could bring him back today and we asked him, was it the right tactic . Was integration the way to go . Should we have fought to force all of these bigoted white southern rednecks, the strom thurmans of the world, to actually make everything equal . We did have been better if they had done that and they were forced to spend millions and millions and then billions on creating equality and then eventually come to the conclusion themselves that they had to stop, rather and fighting it out and weeding it at the cost of in cases like Prince Edward county, virginia, big kids not being able to go to school at all . Doug marshall would have been unflinching in the support of what he did. He had a number of arguments in texas about that very thing where the Texas Legislature offered to create a separate black law school. To put money into it and really buff it up. What marshall suggested was that you still would not get something that was the same quality as what other people had. His belief was that until you forced the students to be in the same places, you are not going to get similar kinds of funding, similar kinds of resources to go to those schools. Even though you might get Better Schools than you had before, better facilities than you had before, they still would not be up to par to the ones that other students had access to. He was a Firm Believer as with houston, that once you put those students together, then you cannot separate other resources. And would for us to get an equal education or otherwise you gain partially equal but not the same thing. He was adamant about that from the very start to the very beginning and even today, still believing that was the way to go and the world were in now would not have happened as quickly as you had followed another pathway. You might have had a number separates ghouls, maybe Better Schools, but still wouldnt have had the same quality resources. We cant see in Society Today that we still see the resources to poor areas, to areas of color dont get the same resources because you cant separate them out and find other devices to get resources into other places secretly. So i think i dont think marshall would have varied at all or had any regrets about the pathway that he followed. He was a Firm Believer in desegregation. I think we are now going to open it up to the audience. Are there people with microphones somewhere . In the back. We would like you to use the microphones so that your questions get heard for our online community. Right here. Mola am i on saw . My question is for mr. Think think all men. Big mr. Fickle men. It is jim crow a Southern Institution . So the gym crow, of course, began as a singing and dancing figure in the period before the civil war. That is where jim crow came from. Of course jim crow comes to stand for segregation. And the answer is that in most of the United States, at some point there are some elements of segregation so that some places its stunned by law and some places its done by custom. I for once was doing research on the history of civil rights and detroit, and i came across a manual published by the Real Estate Brokers of michigan explaining how you steer people to the right neighborhood for them. And by the way, it was not merely black and white. There was a whole section on where you send jews so they will not live in neighborhoods where White Christians do not want them and then there were discussions about how if you have a black client, you need to steer them to the right neighborhood where they belong. And so this was not legal and it was not a statute, it was simply an institution created by an entire profession. He had that across the board. On the other hand, we were talking before about the first School Desegregation case to win takes place and iowa in 1868, when an African American man in iowa named Alexander Clark sues the school board because the school board wont let his daughter go to high school, and there isnt a high school for blacks, and the iowa law, everybody is entitled to an education, and you cannot discriminate and the iowa Supreme Court says if you allow segregated schools four blocks, then you will have to set up schools for catholics or for jews or for germans, or for french people, and basically the court marks the whole idea of discrimination for anybody. So in the north you have this wide range. Ill give you one kind of example. In 1875, Congress Passes an important law known as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which provides four public accommodations for all people, says you cant discriminate in hotels, in restaurants, on trains, on streetcars, in beaters, in places where people gather in the public. The Supreme Court strikes that down in 1883 and says its unconstitutional. You cannot make the hotels in new york opened their doors to blacks. Im going to slow it down because of class. Im going to end it right now very quickly. In the next 25 years, virtually, every northern and Western State passes their own Civil Rights Act making such discrimination illegal. They dont always enforce it as we. No but they make it illegal. So on one level, yes, segregation is found in the north, but compared to the south its a completely different world. The reality is that blacks hold Public Office in the north they go to the state universities, in the north they faced discrimination. They face racism. But in the south they are completely cut out of public life. Remember, until the 1930s, 90 of all African Americans live in the former 15 slave states, plus washington, d. C. , which is also a segregated city. The segregation is affecting the vast majority of African Americans. But it is a class. I will stop. You should never let a College Professor the United States right now is on the precipice of being in the majority minority country. My question is, do you believe in the current Political Climate that the brown versus board of education would pass the current Supreme Court . Wow. Let us say im not ups to mystic. Im always hopeful, but not optimistic that this court with fine for that. The question is what a civil rights law passed congress now, and im not sure that would happen either. I think were in a different time and we hope to pass through it and get to a better time, but these are dicey times. Hey, good evening. My question is this. Knowing Thurgood Marshalls history and of course about the history mystery of the disappearance of lloyd gains. Do you believe i guess the question is about, if he was here what would you ask him . Im going to have to rely on both of you for this. Do you believe that if he could do it all again, what would be the thing that he would do differently considering that he was so close into breaking things wide open with lloyd canes and of course, he leaves the hotel and disappears and we cannot find him in the history books anymore . I think what marshall himself said is that the disappointment in that he couldnt find someone to stay the course and had the wherewithal to really hang in there. In the case of oklahoma, the thing he says about shes a strong person, determined and shoe will stay the course, and she will not drop by the wayside because it is taken so long. I think the other thing is that lloyd gains had quite an ego and even sweet met him at michigan and was not impressed by law it gains because he began to read his own headlines and began to see himself is important and unwanted some special treatment, and what made marshall Going Forward was to be more careful about the character and quality of the people that they brought forward to head of these cases to make sure that they had the character and the wherewithal, but also that they had the right credentials in the sense that they werent issues in their background, issues and how they presented themselves that might be used as an excuse for them not to be allowed into the schools. So the lesson he learned was to carefully select individuals. You want to stand for your test cases. If i could add just one more thing to that. In cases involving social change, sometimes an organization can choose its client, can choose its plaintiff. So in the montgomery bus case, rosa parks is not some random person. Rosa parks is the secretary of the naacp in montgomery. She knows exactly what she is doing and she is doing it because shes the right person to do it. On the other hand, sometimes somebody simply comes along and finds themselves in the situation, and i think in some cases like lloyd gains was like that. One funny story about sweat. He is a postal delivery person. He is not a wealthy person at all. He is applying for the university of texas law school, and in the process he gets invited up to austin and ushered into the main rich persons white hotel, and he walks in the front door, which black people arent supposed to do, and immediately the bomb and takes him to the elevator, which hes not supposed to get into, and hes taken up to a suite where he is not supposed to go, and in this sweet are a number of very wealthy texas businessmen with literally a bag of cash, and they offer him this bag of cash if he will withdraw his case, and he walks away. He later suffers tremendous medical problems because of the nurse and the stress of this, but hes one tough man who is willing to stick it the toughness to stay away from bribery, but your toughness to understanding whats ahead of you and what you might give up along the way. So what we dont often think about is the told that these individuals play over the long haul in terms of what happens to them in their lives. But we didnt talk about, and i will mention real quickly is that we dont realize about marshall, is how much he put himself in danger to be a civil rights lawyer in the south. He almost found himself lynched in one instance. Save only his friends who would not leave him. He would go to town and as soon as he would get to town, the local residents would put him in a car and taken from house to house each night so the local officials would not know where he was. This entire process of social engineering also called for a great deal of personal courage along the way. I think that thats one of the things we do not remember about marshall because we think of him as a Supreme Court justice. The title, mister civil rights, was a title he had up through the fifties because of what he stood for and the changes that he brought with him. We dont often think or recognize and understand that about him or more importantly about the people in those locations who decide to step forward and to defy the local laws because he said, i would come in, try these cases, win them, lose them, go home. They had to stay there and live through that which followed to stand up against the local people who did a variety of really unimaginable things to punish them for having had the nerd to nerve to stand up against local custom. That character runs throughout these individuals who are involved in these processes. There is also an odd flip side to this in that many of these cases, when you read the stories in spencers book, which is really a very good book, you will learn a lot. One of the things that comes out is that the University Administrators who are required to segregate do so in ways that undermine their own case. So for example, when sweat applies for the university of texas in law school, the dean of the law school does not say you are unqualified. He says we would admit you, but you are a negro, is the word that it was at the time. When adasipial applying to the law school, you would make a fine candidate but for the fact youre the wrong color. So that when you go into court and make the argument she should be let in or he should be let in, you have essentially the dean saying yes,. There are also remarkable examples of students in oklahoma and texas who protest segregation. So in one case a man named mclaren who is in his 60s and getting a doctorate in education is told he must set at a separate table in the cafeteria. At the library. And white students simply come and join him, sort of daring the administration to arrest him. That is also part of the story. But what spencer has not talked about it is the way marshal also goes into the south and defends people charged with crimes, and hes putting his life at risk every time he does it. The fact that martial is never lynched is in some ways remarkable because he could have face that many times. My father was a great admirer of thurgood marshall. I still remember the conversation at dinner the day he was confirmed to the Supreme Court. I think theyre probably are some younger people who perhaps do not know cases, significant cases that he wrote decisions for. I just wonder i know the book focus is more on his civil rights career and there was maybe a decision or two that we can discuss that he weighed in on. I can give one. I think he is probably better with it at the law part of. It for me, his Supreme Court years were significant, but not the most significant part about him. I was just trying to think about there are a couple of cases what he was in terms of his strength and his focus was that he was against the Death Penalty consistently. He believed in the rights of the poor to be treated fairly by the courts