From The Writer's Almanac
On this day in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson named the first African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall, to the Supreme Court. Marshall argued and won his first Supreme Court case at 32, Chambers v. Florida, which dealt with undue police pressure on suspects. In 1954, his victory in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, which had set the "separate but equal" policy of school segregation. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed that, in practice, the facilities designated for black students were inferior in every aspect. He was right at home in the liberal-leaning Supreme Court of the 1960s, but over time the demographic of the court changed, and by the end of his tenure he was known as "the Great Dissenter."
He once said, "I intend to wear life as a loose garment," and described himself as a hedonist who didn't have time for pleasure. He enjoyed poker and bourbon and pigs' feet, and placing two-dollar bets at the racetrack, and never took himself too seriously. One famous anecdote tells the story about a white family, tourists, who accidentally got on the justices' elevator in the Supreme Court building. Marshall was already on the elevator, and they mistook him for the elevator operator. They told him their floor, and he replied, "Yessir, yessir." It was only when he got off with them that they realized who he was, and he watched their reaction in amusement.
He was a self-described "hell-raiser" in school, and his teacher used to send miscreants to the basement to study the Constitution. "I made my way through every paragraph," he said. His was the dissenting voice at the 1987 bicentennial celebration of the Constitution; while other speakers praised the document and the founding fathers' foresight, he said: "The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite 'The Constitution,' they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago. ... The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. 'We the People' no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of 'liberty,' 'justice,' and 'equality,' and who strived to better them."
Although he had once said, "I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband," he retired from the court in 1991 due to ill health. A reporter asked what was wrong with him. He answered, "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and I'm coming apart."
Note: I can't help but be reminded of today's Tea Party folk when Justice Marshall speaks of "Contemporary Americans". Their desire to roll back the progress of these United States to a time when "things were better". Maybe so, but certainly not for everybody!
