Word: courtly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marshall never doubted that his side would prevail in the end. "You can say all you want," Marshall told a black newspaper publisher not long after Brown was decided, "but those white crackers are going to get tired of having Negro lawyers beating them every day in court." In time Marshall would persuade the court to extend the Brown principles to public accommodations ranging from public housing to beaches...
...President Kennedy appointed Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Four years later, President Johnson named him Solicitor General--the government's top Supreme Court lawyer--and in 1967 Johnson spoke of "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place" and named Marshall to the Supreme Court...
Marshall penned some of the court's most important decisions, including a sweeping 1969 ruling upholding people's right to possess pornography in their home and a 1972 decision striking down the death penalty because of the inconsistent way in which it was applied by judges and juries. He brought an iconoclastic perspective to the cloistered world of the high court. When fellow Justices struck down racial quotas in medical-school admissions, Marshall took issue with those who said poor whites should be given the same help as blacks. "There's not a white man in this country...
...quarrel with them Viet Cong"--one of the more telling remarks of the era. The government prosecuted him for draft dodging, and the boxing commissions took away his license. He was idle for 3 1/2 years at the peak of his career. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that the government had acted improperly. But Ali bore the commissions no ill will. There were no lawsuits to get his title back through the courts. No need, he said, to punish them for doing what they thought was right. Quite properly, in his mind, he won back the title...
...silently suffer all the vile things that would come his way. Believe me, it wasn't Jackie's nature to do that. He was a fighter, the proudest and most competitive person I've ever seen. This was a man who, as a lieutenant in the Army, risked a court-martial by refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. But when Rickey read to him from The Life of Christ, Jackie understood the wisdom and the necessity of forbearance...