Word: thurgood
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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...
...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...
Backers of diversity are taking notice. Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit consortium of lawyers, provides 50 scholarships to minority undergraduates to attend a 16-session Kaplan LSAT course. Kaplan has set up a similar voucher program in California. The New York City-based Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund offers students at six historically black universities Princeton Review courses for $375--half the regular price. "In the short term," Sharlot says, "nothing could be more helpful in increasing the pool of competitive minority applicants than access to the prep courses." He may be right: last summer 16 students took a Princeton Review course...
...Blackmun, it features frank, behind-the-scenes assessments of the Justices and quotes from E-mail sent over the court's computers. The book discusses legal history and doctrines, but it is the tales out of school that will no doubt attract the most attention. Lazarus repeats accounts that Thurgood Marshall, the court's legendary first black Justice, watched soap operas during the workday, and says he let his law clerks do almost everything but cast his vote. Lazarus says it was "received wisdom" among the clerks that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was so peeved at Justice William Brennan...