Kia Franklin
Happy 100th Birthday, Thurgood Marshall!
Cross-posted from TPMCafe:
As a young African American woman and the first lawyer in my family, I find Justice Thurgood Marshall’s life both professionally and personally inspiring. But today, which would have been Marshall’s 100th birthday, is not just personally significant. It is a day where everyone who is passionate about fairness and equality should pause and reflect on what we must learn from his legacy.
Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was a pioneer for legal equality who used the civil court system as a tool for change. Born in 1908 in the segregated South, Marshall experienced all the obstacles and indignities that young people today only see in documentaries and textbooks. But by the time he died in 1993, he had not only witnessed the dismantling of formal legal racism, he had actually played an integral role in achieving it.
As a young lawyer he worked to chip away at Jim Crow, combining sophisticated litigation strategies that earned him respect among colleagues, with a unique wit and humor that warmed even those most staunchly hostile to his anti-racist agenda. At the end of his tenure as a civil rights trial lawyer he had won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases. But speaking at his alma mater, Howard Law School, in 1978, he warned graduates against believing that the struggle for social justice would end with a few, or even many, courtroom victories:
"[I]t seems to me that what we need to do today is to refocus. Back in the 30s and 40s we could go no place but to court. We knew then that the court was not the final solution. Many of us knew the final solution would have to be politics. . . . So now we have both -- we have our legal arm and we have our political arm. Let's use them both. And don't listen to this myth that it can be solved by either or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved. You can't stand still. You must move. . . . "
Marshall's words could not be truer today. The battleground for achieving social justice through the courts has changed dramatically, in part because many people cannot even get past the courthouse door. My work involves researching and challenging the big business lobby's efforts to create rules that make it more difficult for people to file important legal claims against powerful corporations. The work involves a steep learning curve, a lot of time and effort, and an income nearly as modest as the same ordinary people whose legal rights I'm working to protect.
But as Marshall indicated thirty years ago, the work is important because the law's role in achieving a fair and just society has changed. The challenge today is to make the civil legal system work more effectively for those fighting for social justice through the courts; those who face the most daunting obstacles to obtaining it. This includes people like the low-income single parent fighting for child custody without a lawyer, the elderly consumer fighting predatory lending, and the hardworking employee fighting workplace discrimination.
Recent Supreme Court decisions have reversed much of the progress achieved over Marshall's lifetime. These reversals go by names like Ledbetter, where the Court made it more difficult for women to fight gender-based discrimination, and Exxon, which severely cut a punitive damages award against a company involved in one of our country's most devastating environmental disasters. These business-friendly decisions remind us that ordinary Americans still experience significant barriers to justice, although the battleground may not look exactly the same as it did when Marshall was a young lawyer.
While the fight for social justice today will entail different strategies than it did when Marshall was a young lawyer, Marshall's tenacity, creativity, and ultimate success achieving significant victories remind us of what is possible. That itself is cause to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, and reason to reflect on how we all, as persons dedicated to making our society work more fairly and equally, can further his rich legacy.
The author is Managing Editor of the tort law and policy blog, TortDeform.Com, and Civil Justice Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.
Shout outs to ACS blog for cross posting this.
Posted at 3:51 PM, Jul 02, 2008 in Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Comments
Hi Kia:
I'd like to republish this article in my news/blogs section at Legal Trends Network. Can we get in touch somehow outside of your blog?
Warmly,
Gina Drew CEO
Legal Trends Network
Posted by: Gina Drew | July 2, 2008 06:50 PM
One has to put things in perspective. The lawyer of the time had enacted unconstitutional laws, blatantly violating plain English at the 8th grade reading level of the Fourteenth Amendment. The cult criminal had given total immunity to the terrorist organizations of the Democrat Party. These Democrat Party terrorist enforcers felt free to murder and plunder with total immunity.
Something had to change. When it did, heroic federal judges had to run for their lives. Even these members of the hierarchy were not safe from the lawyer founded and run terrorist organizations controlled by the Democrat Party.
Marshall's work trumped all that. It was an opportunity for lawyer rent seeking, and generated massive work for lawyers. He was an extreme leftist. He never met a criminal he did not want to free and empower. Revisionist historians will trace a massive catastrophe for black folks to his body of work, and that of his lawyer followers.
1) Destruction of the black family. The latter survived slavery, war, the Klan, lynchings, poverty, discrimination. It did not survive the Democrat liberal lawyer, and the mass attack by the lawyer, especially the horrible feminist lawyer.
2) There may have been 5000 extra-judicial lynchings, maybe 10,000. After Marshall, the criminal had nearly total immunity. The result was an excess of 5000 black murder victims each and every year for the past 50 years. This is two orders of magnitude more murderous than the entirety of lynchings. The lawyer founded and run Democrat terrorist arm Klan had total immunity from local district attorneys and judges. That was a crime against humanity by the Democrat Party lawyer. Now, Marshall and his ilk, immunized all criminals in black areas. By his criminal lover decisions, his thugs assassinated 100's of 1000's of black folks. If anyone thinks poor people ever used to it, they are quite mistaken. Every murder is as painful to the poor family as it is to the family of any other murder victim. The rent is never absent from any lawyer enterprise, such as the Democrat terror arm, the Klan. The Klan murdered successful, propertied blacks. Their property was just taken. The lawyer made good money from murder, not just gratified hate. Rent seeking explains all anomalous lawyer conduct.
3) Marshall was a habitual traitor to the Constitution. He repeatedly, shamelessly violated Article I Section 1, and brought total public hatred on the court. The Court has a legitimate and essential function, now held in outraged contempt by the public due to Marshall's irresponsible tyrannical conduct on the court.
Because of left wing bias, Kia will never understand the devastation black folks suffered at Marshall's hand.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | July 2, 2008 10:27 PM
Thurgood Marshall deserves to be remembered as an effective lawyer, an American patriot and a true believer in the cause of civil rights.
While I would not regard him as a good Supreme Court justice, his place in Valhalla was already fully earned long before he was appointed to the nation's highest court
Posted by: Paul W Dennis | July 3, 2008 08:46 AM