Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary
A Biography by Juan Williams
Washington Afro-American editorial after Thurgood Marshall’s death.
Introduction to the book
It was Marshall who ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the ‘Separate-but-Equal’ apartheid of American life in the first half of the century. It was Marshall who won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools. The success of the Brown case sparked the 1960s civil rights movement, led to the increased number of black high school and college graduates and the incredible rise of the black middle-class in both numbers and political power in the second half of the century.
And it was Marshall, as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice, who promoted affirmative action — preferences, set-asides and other race conscious policies — as the remedy for the damage remaining from the nation’s history of slavery and racial bias. Justice Marshall gave a clear signal that while legal discrimination had ended, there was more to be done to advance educational opportunity for people who had been locked out and to bridge the wide canyon of economic inequity between blacks and whites.
He worked on behalf of black Americans, but built a structure of individual rights that became the cornerstone of protections for all Americans. He succeeded in creating new protections under law for women, children, prisoners, and the homeless. Their greater claim to full citizenship in the republic over the last century can be directly traced to Marshall. Even the American press had Marshall to thank for an expansion of its liberties during the century.
Marshall’s lifework, then, literally defined the movement of race relations through the century. He rejected King’s peaceful protest as rhetorical fluff that accomplished no permanent change in society. And he rejected Malcolm X’s talk of violent revolution and a separate black nation as racist craziness in a multi-racial society.
The key to Marshall’s work was his conviction that integration — and only integration — would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once individual rights were accepted, in Marshall’s mind, then blacks and whites could rise or fall based on their own ability.
Marshall’s deep faith in the power of racial integration came out of a middle class black perspective in turn of the century Baltimore. He was the child of an activist black community that had established its own schools and fought for equal rights from the time of the Civil War. His own family, of an interracial background, had been at the forefront of demands by Baltimore blacks for equal treatment. Out of that unique family and city was born Thurgood Marshall, the architect of American race relations in the twentieth century.
After Marshall died in 1993 there was still no authoritative, thorough account of his life and the impact his work had on the nation. The combination of his reclusiveness and his standing in popular culture as an elderly, establishment figure blinded much of the nation to the importance of Marshall’s work. Young people were especially uninformed about the critical role Marshall had played in making history.
A new biography – Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary – is intended to fill some of that vacuum. In these pages the great storyteller tells his stories. And the history, of both his family and the civil rights movement, are in one place so that future generations can understand the dynamics that created and sustained Marshall’s conception of successful race relations. Given that Marshall laid the foundation for today’s racial landscape, his grand design of how race relations best work makes his life’s story essential for anyone delving into the powder-keg of America’s greatest problem. He was truly an American Revolutionary.
Interview's with Thurgood
Speeches an articles
The Equality Speech
Washington, DC, Nov. 18, 1978
The Sword and the Robe
May 8, 1981
Remarks on the Bicentennial of the Constitution
Maui, Hawaii, May 8, 1987
Marshall’s Law
by Juan Williams, January 7, 1990
The Private Thurgood Marshall
by Juan Williams
The Many Masks of Thurgood Marshall
by Juan Williams, The Washington Post January 31, 1993
Thurgood Marshall photo gallery
Juan Williams
Juan Williams is the author of the non-fiction bestseller Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.
He is host of America’s Black Forum, the nationally syndicated tv show and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
He is a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday. Mr. Williams began his journalistic career more than 20 years ago at The Washington Post. He has served the paper as a police reporter, editorial writer, columnist, and White House correspondent. Articles by Williams have appeared in magazines ranging from Fortune and The Atlantic Monthly to Ebony, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and The New Republic.
The winner of several journalism awards for reporting and commentary, Mr. Williams has also won an Emmy Award for TV documentary writing. He has written a series of critically acclaimed documentaries including “Politics – The New Black Power “; “Marian Anderson”; and “A. Philip Randolph – For Jobs and Freedom.” He has appeared on numerous television shows including Nightline, Washington Week in Review, Arsenio, Oprah, CNN’s Crossfire {where he served as co-host for several years} and Inside Washington.
His inspirational and informative speaking style has earned him praise from corporations, trade associations, colleges, civil rights groups and citizen associations.