ABA Journal
Posted August 11, 2017
By Lee Rawles
From left, Gilbert A. King, author of “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America”; Ira M. Feinberg of Hogan Lovells; and Georgetown University Law Professors Susan Bloch and Sheryll Cashin, speak at "The Legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of His Historic Appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court," on Friday at the ABA Annual meeting in New York City./Photo by Len Irish
On the cusp of the 50th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall's confirmation as the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice, three of his former law clerks gathered to speak about his legacy.
Ira Feinberg, Susan Bloch and Sheryll Cashin took the stage Friday with Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America. The event, “The Legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of His Historic Appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court,” was a CLE Showcase program at the ABA Annual Meeting in New York City, sponsored by the Section of Litigation.
King kicked off the program by giving the audience a primer on Marshall’s early years heading the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. King says that photos commonly used to illustrate the Jim Crow South show segregated water fountains or “Whites Only” signs and leave the impression that the laws were merely “rude or inconvenient.” His research shows a deeper reality of “brutality and terrorism.”
Marshall defied the system of brutality and terrorism every time he traveled south to defend black people in capital cases, constantly endangering his life, King says. In the summer of 1946, there was a wave of lynchings in which black World War II veterans were being murdered for wearing their uniforms. U.S. Army Sgt. Isaac Woodard was taken off a bus, beaten and blinded in both eyes by South Carolina police officers. The NAACP and Marshall worked to publicize such atrocities and raised funds to provide legal representation to people suffering from racial injustice.
Before Marshall was sworn in to the Supreme Court on Oct. 2, 1967, he had argued before that court 32 times and won 29 of those cases.
Feinberg, now a partner at Hogan Lovells, was 25 years old when he clerked for Marshall in 1973 and 1974. It was “a heady experience,” Feinberg says. “In many ways, Watergate framed the entire year.”
In the six years between Marshall joining the court and Feinberg beginning his clerkship, there had been a sea change. When Marshall joined, it was the Warren Court, known for liberal decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education. By 1973, with four President Richard M. Nixon appointees, it had become the conservative Burger Court, and Marshall found himself on the dissenting side of many opinions.
Feinberg recalled a school busing case during his term, which was a “very bitter pill” for Marshall, as the desegregation jurisprudence he’d worked to establish was chipped away. He found himself “a dissenter on most of the things he cared about,” Feinberg says.
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.