Thurgood Marshall Was An Eloquent Speaker

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds. Thurgood Marshall (1908-93)

In case you don’t know, Thurgood Marshall was the first African American appointment to the Supreme Court. And he was a powerful speaker. He could take the most mundane topic, and make it sound powerful and inspiring.

Of course he rarely dealt with the mundane while he was on the high court. He left a void that has never been replaced IMHO.

I almost cried when he left. Truly. :slight_smile:

He did greater things as a lawyer for the NAACP than he did once he was actually on the Court, IMHO, but it was of course a historic appointment. I remember in Woodward and Armstrong’s The Brethren, an interesting book about SCOTUS behind the scenes in the Seventies, that Marshall from time to time would be mistaken by tourists as an elevator operator at the Court. He would good-naturedly hit the buttons for the floors requested and not tell them who he was.

I’ve always said that America has had three great Marshalls: John, George and Thurgood.

An excellent, but difficult to read, book that involves Marshall is The Devil in the Grove. Just devastating to read.

Poetic Justice Thurgood

Marshall certainly deserves his props. His early work for the NAACP and his litigation of Brown and other cases did a lot for this country and he should be commended for that. His rhetoric was indeed beautiful.

However, as a judge he became doddering and his legal skills were poor at best. Take the case you just cited, Stanley v. Georgia.

The writing is wonderful; almost makes you want to get a musket and kill a British dude. But there is no substance behind it. The government wasn’t banning books critical of the government or of any thought at all. It was prohibiting obscenity which had been prohibited at the founding and since. It suppressed no ideas nor “control[led} men’s minds” except to the extent of a masturbatory orgasm, I guess.

Further, the decision gave no fundamental right to possess obscenity as a dissenting judge noted (paraphrasing) that unless the man was a pornographer who filmed obscenity in his basement and watched it in the attic, he was required to break the law to exercise this wonderful right that Marshall so eloquently described. He had to go to a seedy part of town, illegally buy obscenity, then illegally possess it before he breached his front door wherein it became Marshall’s magical “right.”

If the man was stopped for a traffic infraction on the way home and through a legal search the obscenity was found, he could be fully punished, even though he was simply trying to reach the ultimate sanctuary of his home.

Marshall could have said the same thing about recreational drug use in the home, adultery or polygamy in the home, and it would have been just as empty.

He held that the death penalty was always unconstitutional even though the Constitution clearly allows someone’s life to be taken after due process of law. His questions at oral argument were embarrassing.

I think it is fine for history to recognize what he did, but as a judge he ruled just like he wanted and not what the law demanded.

Here’s my thread about Thurgood Marshall and senility. I’d say the consensus is that he definitely declined.