In 1930, the same year that a young Thurgood Marshall was told that the University of Maryland had no place for him in its law school because of the color of his skin, William Faulkner’s searing novel As I Lay Dying made its way into the world.
There is, of course, nothing, as one might expect, to suggest any sort of convergence between these two events. They are distant and cold to each other. But, in the world of ideas, inside our spinning heads as we try to make sense of this strange and verbally violent America we’ve watched gestating for years in our full view, the two seem to slam into each other.
As one might expect, Marshall was deeply affected by Maryland’s overt racism in denying him a place in its law school, bruised yet ultimately more determined in the wake of the school’s decision. Had he been alive on June 28, 2010, many of those old thoughts and feelings may have rushed forward once again, stemming again from a plague of hatred heaped on a black man who wanted nothing more than to take his rightful place in the world and work to change at least some of what he’d seen from his vantage point growing up in Baltimore.
As is true with all giants, the Marshall consigned to history’s embrace is a complex aggregation of all that he’d been, all he’d become and all that our memories make him. Even today, his stature looms over U.S. history ... and not just every February when we take down the dusty boxes and nod wanly toward the unfortunate "Black History Month" ... so grand that it’s nearly impossible to take him in at one sweep:
• Grandson of a slave
• Son of a railroad porter
• Slayer of the segregationist entry policy at Maryland
• Chief council for the NAACP
• Staunch defender of individual rights, abortion rights and the right to life of prisoners threatened with death by the state
• The victorious lawyer in Brown v. Board of Education
• The first black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States
I was reminded of much of that while watching the nauseating spectacle that played out Monday in a Senate hearing room, one that saw Elena Kagan and her Democratic defenders holding fast against a Republican onslaught of veiled racist gibberish and gutless slander against the would-be justice’s mentor, Justice Marshall.
In As I Lay Dying, a novel that surely confused as many readers when it was published as it did generations of college students to follow, Faulkner employs multiple viewpoints, a burbling, onrushing, carefully tuned stream-of-consciousness narrative and bold swerves through inner spaces that, given a choice ahead of time, we might choose to avoid, to present us with some sort of congealed truth of the whole.
Something similar should have happened when that broken light of multiple perspectives blasted forth from that hearing room. Some sort of truth should have emerged from multiple views in that room, from multiple answers, many ideas.
But it didn’t ... couldn’t.
Instead, those of us watching from our perch on the left, with Marshall as a particular hero, could only marvel at the utter futility of the entire exercise, the dearth of ideas, the false ritual drama that revealed nothing useful at all. Perhaps Kagan, too, could garner 69 votes as Marshall had with only 11 senators, led by the execrable Strom Thurmond, voting against and 20 not voting at all.
And, then it became worse.
I began, in some dread sense, to imagine the body of Faulkner’s poor old Addie being dragged by a mad, macabre parade formed by the Bundren family as its members took their matriarch toward some sort of funerary end only they could imagine as appropriate. Then, worse, that pale vision morphed into a scene of Justice Marshall’s corpse being dragged about that hearing room without dignity or ceremony while a ragged band of Jim Crows screeched and wheeled around overhead.
There was Jon Kyl of Arizona bizarrely intoning that Kagan was somehow irretrievably lost in her agreement with Marshall that the role of the courts is to "protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government."
As a consequence of that belief, Justice Marshall, Kyl concluded, was just not his idea of "mainstream."
No, we don’t suppose he was.
In what one can only describe as a massive case of misplaced priorities, Texan John Cornyn apparently agreed with Kyl, confiding to all that Marshall's "activist" judicial philosophy was a "major concern" of his.
Jeff Sessions of Alabama, his off-the-beam-in-‘Bama credentials long ago established when he famously remarked that his opinion of the KKK took a downward turn only when he discovered that some of its members had smoked marijuana, darkly muttered that Kagan had sullied herself by associating with "well-known activist judges."
Sessions did not tell the hearing whether he’d looked into the pot-smoking habits of these "activist judges" and graded them accordingly.
Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, who ceased to be entertaining long ago, never one to miss out on a me-too moment such as this one, adopted Sessions’ accusatory tone when he pointedly reminded Kagan that she had "admitted that your upbringing steeped you in deeply held liberal principles" ... as if that steeping, whether voluntary or not, was a disqualifying addiction utterly resistant to any known pathways to rehabilitation.
Frankly, once the crows settled down, one would have been forgiven for thinking that the hearings were eerily reminiscent of HUAC and the deranged communist-hunting of the 1950s.
It was, I think, a day of tremendous embarrassment for America before the eyes of the rest of the world ... or at least that portion that hasn’t given up on us. Instead of accepting the futility of their mission to derail Kagan, an outcome surely glimpsed many many weeks ago, giving the senators ample time to prepare a response that includes some small measure of decorum, the Republican party, reduced as it is to a band of small-minded bigots and grandstanders, chose instead to attack one of the giants of American society and government, a man whose legacy won’t be surpassed by the combined accomplishments of Kyl, Sessions, Hatch, Grassley, Cornyn and their ilk in a dozen charmed lifetimes.
We do know this, though: History will, as it should, paint Justice Marshall in the light of his civil rights work and his trailblazing presence on the Supreme Court. We would also do well to remember, on another plateau of accomplishment, that Marshall was tireless in his pursuit of justice for those nearly defenseless Americans targeted by the system and as an advocate for better conditions for the ones who wound up incarcerated.
Coincidentally, the same year that Maryland’s rejected Marshall’s application, a fire tore through an Ohio prison stuffed to nearly four times its capacity. It killed 322 inmates, many of them poor and black, many trapped in their cells by guards who trained guns on them and refused to release them as the hell bore down from above.
One of the inmates who survived that fire was Chester Himes, a prison writer and a contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who went on to pen Yesterday Will Make You Cry, a frank and powerful experiential novel woven from the rough cloth of his seven years at the Ohio facility.
Through his prison writing Himes tried to convey at least some sense of the identity-shattering assault of incarceration on the inmate’s sense of self. He also came to believe that it’s impossible for whites to fully understand the black experience in America. We saw that played out Monday in that Senate hearing room.
Not only was it important for the GOP senators, who look around them and realize with sadness and anger that the days of absolute white privilege are irretrievably slipping away, to attempt, however impotently, to isolate the virus they see as Justice Marshall’s legacy, to make it small, simple and dangerous, they felt compelled to incarcerate it, to lock it away, and, as Himes suggested, shatter its power to influence black identity.
The unflinching, pie-eyed look plastered on the faces of those white men in the hearing as they recited their lines of hate and talking points of destruction was ample illustration of Chester Himes’ second point. While the Kyls and Hatches and Grassleys and their ilk can never be forgiven for their attempts to use petty racial politics to stain a great American, we can understand how their utter lack of empathy led them to the dreadful scene we all saw on the television yesterday.
They cannot understand even a sliver of what it means to be not-white in America and, as such, that makes it easier for them to spew in the manner they do.
Few can understand, some try, others turn away.
Forgive me one more literary reference in reclaiming the legacy and reputation of Justice Marshall after the tar flung in its direction Monday. Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, counseled her son that "all that lives must die" and we tend to accept that as one of Shakespeare’s many simple truths.
But, as the songwriter said, it ain’t necessarily so.
Reputations of great men and women do live on, as do their works, resistant to any attempts by small people to extinguish them. To many millions of Americans from every walk of life, that is an unassailable truth. I was reminded of that Monday as well.