Idealism and Liberal Education

Thurgood Marshall: Man of Character

Thurgood Marshall: Man of Character In the years ahead, significant volumes of biography and history will undoubtedly enlarge our understanding of Thurgood Marshall's skill as an advocate and his stature as a judge. I want, instead, to consider Justice Marshall as a man ofcharacter. In 1742, Henry Fielding began Joseph Andrews, one of the first great English novels, with the sentence, "It is a trite but true observation that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts: and if this be just in what is odious and blamable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praiseworthy." In calling attention to the power of example to shape our respect for human achievement, Fielding performs an important service . He reminds us that exemplary lives matter. For me-as for the thousands of people, young and old, white and black, from all walks of life, who filed through the Great Hall of the Supreme Court when the justice's body lay in state in January 1993-the example of Thurgood Marshall as a person of character does truly matter and carries extraordinary power. By mastering the law, Thurgood Marshall transcended it, and thereby became an inspiring exemplar of civic virtue. There are doubtless those who worked with Thurgood Marshall whose lives were not changed by that experience. But I have yet to meet one. All ofus-his law clerks, his associates at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and his colleagues at the Justice Department, on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and on the United States Supreme Court-were marked indelibly by Justice Marshall 's idealism and courage, his compassion and humanity, his craftsmanship and wit. The force ofhis moral example changed our lives utterly, and in ways that have made us better citizens and more reflective lawyers. If this nation had an equivalent to Plutarch's Lives-a set of commentaries on men and women who had lived instructive and noble livesan essay on Thurgood Marshall would surely be included. It would capture and memorialize the essential qualities of Marshall's character-his physical courage, his intellectual brilliance and professional expertise, his moral strength, and his utter disregard for fame and wealth. It would 129 130 Idealism and Liberal Education explore, above all, the beliefs that anchored his lifetime commitment to racial and social justice. In a lecture delivered in 1967, Thurgood Marshall argued that the history ofthe litigation leading up to Brown v. BoardofEducation (1954) indicated "that law can not only respond to social change but can initiate it, and that lawyers, through their everyday work in the courts, may become social reformers." Indeed, he went further in stating that lawyers "have a duty in addition to that of representing their clients; they have a duty to represent the public, to be social reformers in however small a way." That lecture states the credo ofa career. Thurgood Marshall was the child of a pragmatic American liberalism . He was an idealist who believed deeply in the rule of the law, in the power ofgovernment to improve the social and economic conditions of its citizens, and in the promise of the Declaration of Independence. He knew that idealism was the most certain foundation ofimmortality. Idealists are not perfect, but their examples endure. In The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois argued, in an often quoted passage, that the central issue for American blacks was the "racial two-ness" that lies at the heart of their identity. "One ever feels his two-ness," he wrote, "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.... The history ofthe American Negro is the history of this strifethis longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self." Like Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall was fiercely proud to be an American and fiercely proud to be a Negro. And for Marshall, as for Du Bois, the complex fate of being an African-American was the overarching challenge of his life. Marshall's life is one of the great American stories; it is emblematic of an heroic theme: a young man from modest circumstances, confronted by racial discrimination and social hostility, contributes mightily , by the power of his mind and the strength of his character, to the redemption of his nation's highest ideals. Born in Baltimore in 1908, the grandson of a freed slave...