Word: thurgood
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pilot episode of the Fox network's new animated sitcom The PJs, Thurgood Orenthal ("Goody") Stubbs, the superintendent of an inner-city housing project, tries to chase a swarm of vagrants out of his embattled building. "Well, I'd love to stay and chat," says one, a series regular named Smokey, "but crack don't smoke itself...
During an especially low moment of the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that "for goodness' sake, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks." Thurgood Marshall's legal career proves otherwise. Juan Williams' magisterial biography of the great civil rights lawyer and first black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (Times Books; 459 pages; $27.50), reminds us that there is a difference between the hair-splitting legalisms that dominate the current headlines and the rule of law that changes history. Marshall never represented a bank. His clients were African Americans deprived of their...
...when President George Bush selected Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, to fill the vacancy. To Marshall, it was an odious and demeaning selection--"they think [Thomas is] as good as I am," he snapped. In fact, even those who most ardently backed Thomas never really thought he was in Thurgood Marshall's league...
...becoming dependent on welfare. As Ronald Reagan's chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he poured disdain on affirmative action--even though it helped him get admitted to Yale Law School. When George Bush in 1991 picked Thomas to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Thurgood Marshall, it was because Thomas would put a black face on the right-wing agenda...
...from recent discussions of race--real feelings, I mean, not the verbal position papers of professional ranters. Since the days of "black and white together" (who sings that anymore?), race talk has descended to bloviations of theories, bigotries and blame, especially blame. Once we thought it would be simple. Thurgood Marshall predicted the end to all school segregation within five years of Brown v. Board of Education. Now we live with thwarted expectations and the sort of intellectual meanness that goes with disappointed hopes. Integration, the best idea this country ever had, dares not speak its name...