Who is the greater hero, Thurgood Marshall or Martin Luther King, Jr.?
As the legal director of the NAACP, Marshall was one of the primary strategists and attorneys that fought the string of winning legal battles that culimated in Brown v. Board of Education which blew to smithereens the idea of “separate but equal”. In other words, the whites could no longer claim that they could segregate schools (and by extension, everything else?) and claim that blacks got the same quality of education as whites. Clearly, this represents a legal hurdle of immense importance.
MLK, on the other hand, while not fighting legal battles of such magnitued, made the fight for civil rights a very public affair. Through marches – and especially all the bad press that the oppression of those marches created – he painted a clear and sickening picture of the repression of blacks in America. Additionally, economic actions, such as the bus boycott, also created a strong impetus to eliminate discrimination.
Now, neither of the above sketches is intended to even remotely capture the greatness of either man, or his legacy. But supposing that the US Treasury Dept. were going to start printing a $15 bill, whose picture do you think should be on it. Who do you think made the greater contribution to civil rights, along with just generally making the world a better place?
Martin Luther King. The hjoliday in his name really celebrates the whole civil rights movement. But, King deserves that honor, IMHO. His achievements were stupendous. He brought main stream opinon in the country to be pro-civil rights.
Brown v. the Board of Education was certain a great and proper decision, but unfortunately it has not been fully successful. In practice, full school integration has not been achieved. More importantly, fully equal education has not been achieved at all. Of course, Marshall had many other important achievements in his NAACP days. He was surely a great hero.
Brown v. Board did not require integration. It required desegregation, i.e., the end of de jure segregation. There is a difference.
The courts couldn’t just leave it at that, of course, and a decade after Brown they dipped their toes into the waters of integration as they handed down a line of decisons requiring busing under the guise of a remedy for past segregation (even in school districts like Denver, where there had never been de jure segregation in the first place). And thus the courts embarked on a three-decade experiment that even its most ardent defenders now admit was an abysmal failure.
No way. People have this view of the courts as some kind of shining knight in armor that sweeps in an fixes all the terrible problems of the world. Bullshit. The judiciary is just as capable of fucking the world up as the legislature and executive. I consider tarnishing that rose-colored view part of my obligation to fight ignorance.
I have little doubt that without SCOTUS certain states would force children to pray in segregated schools while teaching them Creation Science. Contraception would be banned, along with abortion or anything that keeps women out of their rightful place in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. Police would interrogate suspects without informing them of their rights… etc, etc. The list goes on and on.
And of course the SCOTUS has also barred state regulation of the workplace, forcibly sent little schoolchildren on long bus rides to the detriment of their education, forced at least one city to impose a tax increase and fund the Shangri-La of magnet schools only to see the whole plan collapse as a dismal failure. Have the courts done good over the course of their history? Yes. So have Congress, the Presidency, and the state governments. Virtue is not the exclusive province of the courts, nor are they immune to vice.
My point is not that the courts are a terrible institution – hell, I’m a lawyer; that would be an odd position for me to take. Instead, my point is that the courts are not the flawless paragons of justice many make them out to be. They can fuck things up just as well as the other two branches.
In the past 50 years or so, I think SCOTUS has done more for the progress of society than Congress of any of the states would have willingly done on their own.
This, in a nutshell, is a crock of shit. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act did more for African-Americans than Brown and its progeny by virtually every measure. The 26th amendment, securing the right to vote for 18 year olds, was not a product of the courts but rather a joint product of Congress and the state legislatures. While SCOTUS has refused (correctly as a matter of law, I might add) to expand civil rights protections to gays, many states have included homosexuality as a “protected class” in their own civil rights statutes. And that’s just working off the top of my head.
IMHO black people by their own individual efforts have done a thousand times as much for civil rights progress as the Congress and the SCOTUS put together.
Black people have done a lot, if they didn’t set into motion the civil rights movement who knows where we’d be right now.
As for who is greater… when I think about it, MLK is the only man besides Jesus Christ who has a public holiday devoted to his memory, so I’d say he’s pretty darned important.
SCOTUS still reserved the right to determine the scope of what protections can constitutionally be enforced by apropriate legislation, and some of the “civil rights” laws they enforced were on private businesses that reside within one state but advertised out of state… they gave Congress a LOT of leeway when it came to their Commerce Clause powers.
Lemme get this straight…you’re going to give SCOTUS more credit than Congress for the effects of the 1964 and 1965 Acts because of the expansive interpretations they had given the Commerce Clause? Even though that expansiveness had been largely established three decades prior?
Then what, pray tell, was your point? Your comment was tantamount to giving the Eisenhower administration credit for Brown because it sent in the National Guard in Little Rock to enforce that ruling.
Some of us are still old enough to remember when Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday were separate holidays, back before used car dealers and bedding manufacturers strongarmed the merging of the two into “President’s Day.”
