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tv   American History TV  CSPAN  December 27, 2014 6:13am-7:03am EST

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so i'm inclined to put this in the same category as when daniel webster made his plea in the john marshall, there were tears in his eyes. it's a good story and somebody tells it at some point in the history of writing up these incidents and it's too good for people not to repeat. that isn't to say it didn't happen. >> so, before we go, i wanted to talk about holmes' views about lincoln. because it seems like that not only was holmes after his wartime experience ambivalent about the war, but he was also ambivalent about lincoln. when people asked him about lincoln later on, he didn't really put lik con even in the great man category. i was curious as to why you thought that. >> i don't really know the answer to that question. i've been curious about it, too.
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i find it puzzling. he did vote for lincoln in 1864. there's no doubt about that. he didn't in 1860 because he couldn't get vote in 1860. but you're quite right that he never really expressed the kind of reverence for lincoln and admiration for lincoln and profound respect for lincoln's leadership and what lincoln stood for that one might have thought that, i think, his father, oliver wendell holmes sr., did. and it may have something to do with the kind of skepticism with which he emerged from the war with -- about so much. of everything. but it still does puzzle me. i don't have a good answer to that question. >> well, he comes out of the war, remember, with a very strong sense of what a mess the campaigns were.
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and the experience at potomac would have confirmed that. for long periods of holmes' service he's wading through swamps trying to get from the virginia northern neck area to richmond in two different aborttive efforts to invade richmond. he sees people randomly shot. he gets randomly shot. he sees people run to their deaths because somebody gives him a wrong order. he never has any sense of what the general plan of the war is. so, he may have associated lincoln with the strategists of the war and thought that it was pretty much of a cockup and partly blamed lincoln for that. and then, of course, he comes out of the war and he's not an abolitionist. he has a richer attitude toward
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confederat confederates, the returning confederates. no reason to lionize lincoln. lionization wasn't holmes' style. there -- he wrote a lot of affecti affectionate tributes to people on their deaths and remembering them and said some nice things about them. but fulsome praise was not his meteir. so, i can imagine him having an attitude of lincoln of decreasing attachment over the years. >> dr. holmes came up -- i think one thing we haven't discussed today is holmes himself was the son of a very famous father at the time. and his father capitalized on his wounds at antetim wrote a famous story. know can you make too much of this sort of struggle to escape his father's father and i don't
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mean to be that reductivist but do you think this sort of created at least an es strangement between holmes and his father or at least put a distance between him ska that his father who was an ar dent abolitionist before and after the war and holmes who wasn't an ar dent abolitionist caused strain in their relationship? >> could be. ted referred to holmes' love/hate relationship with b bramin class in boston. i think love/hate is too strong to discuss his relationship with his father but he had an ambivalent relationship with his father. it was a close relationship but on the other hand an ambitious young man is trying to escape from the shadow of a prominent father especially since he's moving into a different kind of profession. >> i know you've written a lot about this but i want to get
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your take on this because you can't really talk about holmes during the war without talking about his relationship with his father. >> first of all, the generation of holmes' parents, holmes' father, they were not -- holmes' father was not an abolitionist at the time the war broke out. in some way holmes' group is making a statement by enlisting. but i think holmes resented the "my captain article." if you can understand his circumstances, he's in his second wound, returning from the battle. his father comes down meet him and writes an article in which the thrust of the article is i, oliver wendell sr., who's a household word at the time, writing about my son. so, just don't forget even though he's a returning civil war veteran, that he's my son.
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and and i think holmes did not appreciate that. holmes jr. did not appreciate that. going into law is a way of distancing himself from his father. no question about it. >> on that note, i promised i'd end at 7:00. i thank you all for coming. this has been a remarkable panel with two remarkable people. please give them a round of applause. >> you've been watching c-span's american history tv. follow us on cspanhistory, connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/yspanhistory or check out our website at c-span.org/history. >> we'd like to tell you about some of our other american history tv programs. join us every sunday at 8 p.m.
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eastern for a special look at the presidency. learn from leading historians about presidents and first ladies, their policies and legacies and hear directly from chief executives through historical archival speeches. again, programs on the presidency here on american history tv on c-span $3. here are some featured programs you'll find on c-span networks. saturday night at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span, supreme court justice elena kagan at princeton university. sunday at 8 p.m. on q&a, fact-checker author glenn on his 2014 awards. on c-span2 saturday night at 10 p.m. on book tv's after words, damon root on the long-standing battle of judicial restraint. sunday at 10 p.m. eastern, book
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critic jonathan yardley who recently retired after 33 years with "the washington post." and on american history tv on c-span3, saturday at 6 p.m. eastern on the civil war, historians and authors discuss president lincoln's 1864 re-election campaign. sunday afternoon at 4:00 on real america, tried by fire. a 1965 film that chronicles the 84th infantry division during the battle of the bulge. find our complete schedule at c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at 202-626-3400. e-mail us at comments@c-span.org. tweet us @cspan/comments.joñ thursday good marshall and the naacp.
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they explored marshall's early law career as well as his work in the south to expand voting rights for african-americans. we'll also hear about his arguments before the u.s. supreme court and how he became the first african-american appointed to the highest court in the land. this program lasts about 50 minutes. let me introduce our panelists. you've already met to my far left mick caouette, the producer of "mr. civil rights," distinguished producer of documentary films. we're going to hear from mick about what led him to make this film. to my immediate left kimberle crenshaw distinguished professor of law at both ucla and columbia university. professor crenshaw teaches civil rights and courses in rate studies and constitutional law. she's been a leader in the critical race theory movement. in fact, founded a think tank
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devote the to race and gender. she's published extensively in this area. she's a graduate of cornel and harvard law school and has a masters degree from the university of wisconsin. to my immediate right, larry gibson is distinguished professor at university of maryland school of law. professor gibson is the author of a book that i hope many of you have purchased and will read. it's called "young thursday good," a wonderful biography of justice marshall's years growing up here and practicing law here. professor gibson grew up in baltimore, attended howard university. he was the first african-american law professor at university of virginia before accepting a faculty position here in maryland. he has been engaged in many civic activities in maryland and served for a time in the u.s.
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justice department as associate deputy attorney general and director of national economic crimes project. to my far right is my colleague here at university of baltimore school of law is jose anderson. jose is one our finest professors. has taught here since 1989. teaches criminal law, criminal procedure. before joining the school he practiced law for nine years. in the maryland public defender's office supervised the appellate division. he's taught here and at the wharton school and has received awards for his teaching, scholarship and mentorship. i'm going to begin questioning of this panel and then i would invite those with questions to come to the microphone. i'll turn it over to the audience as we progress. i'll start by asking mick
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caouette, the film maker, to this subject, thursday good marshall. how did you get from hubert humphrey to thursday good marshall. >> we interviewed robert wilkins, they were friends. we were close to the end of the film i was looking for a new subject and i called roger and said, we would like to do a film about your uncle roy. he said, i love my uncle roy. he was great. he was a good man. he was just straight and he did all kinds of wonderful work. but he was sort of a mid-range business type, he was a suit. and he just -- it's not that exciting a story. if you want to do a really exciting story, do thursday good marshall. the reason he said that is because he grew up with the two of them run be subways in new york, knew them well and loved thursday good marshall and thought it would be a great story. that was the connection. and thursday good marshall, so there was a connection that way. that's kind of how it happened.
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the reason i wanted to do it is because i like to tell, when i can, stories, we've done half a dozen now, four or five, untold stories about people who are heroes who no one knows who continued to shape our lives. this story is really an untold story at least on film. there's been a couple different -- well, a lot of great books but on film it hasn't been done, this part of the story. so, i like to tell those untold stories. that's the reason i did it. also, i -- when i first started learning about him and reading about him, i was inspired by his amazing courage. i mean, courage that just -- it's hard to believe. and his resolve, the fact he just stuck to it. as i said before, he would say, i'm not the courageous one. i would go to the south and these people -- i went down to help them and i get to take a train back to harlem but they sl to stay here. that's what he would always say.
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>> it was an untold story, certainly to a wider audience but there was scholarship and biography and i'm sure you quickly discovered larry gibson's biography, juan williams and other biographies that appeared in the film. let me ask professor gibson, after you wrote "young thursday good" what do we learn in addition about this amazing man through mick's film? >> yeah. mick had quite a challenge here. and so that's a good question. i'll answer that. just think of the challenge of which he's had. there's been four major full-life biographies of thursday good marshall. my book focuses on his formative years. then there are several, many other smaller books. i know of about 40 books about thursday good marshall. he's been portrayed on the film by james earl jones, by sidney
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poitier, laurence fishburne has portrayed him both on stage and in film. so mick had a challenge here, but i think he met it. as i was there, i've listed six items. i'll just mention them quickly, that i think are major contributions of this film to the corpus of thursday gothurgo marshall material. i've seen other mentions of the danger, but i think you presentation in this film the danger, the physical hazard that thursday goods marshal faced in a way i've not seen written about or presented by film. i mean, the way you put it together, it was really palpable. that's a major contribution. that and his courage.
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secondly, the trip south. it's mentioned in some other books, butm=h+uz the central roe that that played in shaping this young man. before this trip thurgood marshall had not been south of virginia. so, this exposure to the deep south really had a dramatic impact on him and this is the first time i've seen that presented as clearly. a third major contribution is the material in here about the teacher pay. these were absolutely the essential part of the beginning of his work at the naacp. the first ten years, he did more teacher pay cases than anything else but there's so little written about it. i think because there are no supreme court decisions. just a couple of appellate decisions. these were decisions and lawsuits in about 12 states where he doubled the income of
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the largest professional group in most black communities, the teachers. and it became the vehicle by which they grew the naacp. and i'm so pleased to see that in this film for the first time, that that series of litigation -- series is highlighted. the fourth item -- again, i'm surprised that no one has really spent much time on is the connection between the harlem renaissance and thurgood's axe activities in the south. we think of him traveling through the south. you presented and i think more about it that, that coming back to new york and sort lbeing ren through the vibrance of that and some of the entertainers and of people that he knew and they would go back into the south is presented in a way i haven't seen in any of the literature.
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world war i, there's been much written about thurgood marshall's involvement with the korean war because of the dramatic encounters he had with douglas macarthur. but there was this major activity on the part of the naacp representing soldiers during world war -- excuse me, world war ii. i said world war i. during world war ii. not only discrimination by the people in the military, but particularly discrimination against soldiers in communities adjacent to military bases. there were so many of the american military installations in the deep south. and i'm so glad that in this film you touch on that. and the final is schmidt versus alright. throughout the latter part of his career, thurgood would
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frequently say he could not decide what was his most important case, whether it was brown versus board of education, the school case, or smith versus alright, the texas voting rights case. if you look at the way he wrote and talked about it, i bet you that if you had said you could only pick one, you've got to pick one most important case, it would have been smith versus alright. i'm really pleased that this film brings that case forward. and there are others where the combination of the ability to use film and to put an emphasis on things that you've helped us a lot. >> i agree. one other theme i thought was so interesting developed in the film is relationship between thurgood marshall and hamilton houston. in fact is going to be publishing a book about him. jose, would you talk about the relationship? you have the student and the dean of a law school and then at
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some point they become colleagues and partners in this incredible endeavor. did they always retain some element of student and teacher or did that fall away? >> well, i think they were continually working together. marshall was a student that houston took notice of because of his sharp mind, his ability to be flexibility, his willingness to do everything from getting sandwiches for the legal team all the way up to challenging the brilliant charles hamilton houston about points he wanted to make in the case. and houston admired this. and, therefore, took thurgood under his wing and made him his sort of most trusted understudy in the legal work. indeed, i think, identified marshall as someone that had the personality to actually carry forward the work of the naacp. the personality that was needed
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to do the fund-raising and to communicate the message and to engage in the public relations that was necessary to advance the agency. but at the same time, to be able to do the high-quality legal work that was necessary to litigate the cases. so, that was a rare combination of qualities. and houston recognized he had them all. actually turned the organization over to him and then continued to work with him for another decade as a private lawyer cooperating with the agency. so, their relationship stayed strong until the end of houston's life in 1950. in fact, in the hundreds and hundreds of letters that i've reviewed between the two of them and about conflicts during the legal campaign where others were writing or complaining about one thing or the other, not one word of criticism between the two men about each other to anyone or to each other. and so i think that that's very
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important. >> thank you. i want to ask professor kimberle crenshaw, we're now moving from history and looking forward, you're someone who has studied race and society and so many ways and from so many perspectives. cue speculate if thurgood marshall were a litigator today and he surveyed the civil rights landscape, where would he be putting his energies? what cases would he be bringing? would he be looking at overincarceration? would he be looking at police brutality? would he be in ferguson, missouri? would he be elsewhere? the administration of the death penalty which is obviously something he was involved in when he was practicing. what do you think? >> well, i think clearly -- okay. i think clearly if thurgood marshall were a litigator today, his -- among his most significant concerns would be the loss of so much in the civil rights infrastructure that -- an
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earlier thurgood marshall would have litigated and put together. i think one of the things that's so fascinating and moving about the film is that we get a sense of what that infrastructure was. how he went about creating it. what an extraordinary person it took to both be a trial lawyer and an appellate lawyer. and to take both those sensibilities into the supreme court to build the rule structure that is necessary to support things like expansive voting rights, to support things like allowing city councils to actually create affirmative action programs that break in groups of people who had been locked out. that would allow local school boards to have more control and authority over the way the desegregation was going to happen. so, he had a structural view about which rules needed to be made so that people on the local level could actually use them to bring about transformation. that's what's being lost now.
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and i think he would be worried that at a higher structural level the gutting of the voting rights act, for example, the gutting of affirmative action through heavier rules and responsibilities on the part of universities to prove that they've tried everything and only at the end of trying everything could they possibly take rules into -- take race into account. all of these would be concerns of his because they trickle down to the local level to make it exceedingly difficult for attorneys to actual lly galvani social change on the ground number one what i think he would be concerned about is trying to mount an effort at the legislative level. to correct for some of the cases -- some of the cases that the supreme court has used to gut existing civil rights law. i don't think he would have let the voting rights act be gutted without having heard from an organized effort to speak back to this. i don't think he would have
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thought that it would be off of table to continue to talk about affirmative action. he was a staunch defender of the idea that there are consequences to our history. and if we don't have race-conscious means to deal with it, the burdens will rest with those who are least able to pay for them. so, i think he would have been very concerned about the consequence. the other thing that's important to say and to reckon with is a thurgood marshall couldn't have gotten appointed to the supreme court today. that we were able to accomplish something nearly 50 years ago that could not be done today. that's something for us to really ponder and worry about. that someone as transformative as thurgood marshall, who changed the face of law in the 20th century, could not be appointed to be one of the individuals who was assigned to interpret that law. that's really a significant
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development. >> yes. i mean, it's hard to imagine anybody with the kind -- the breadth of experience, as you say, as a trial lawyer, a street lawyer, i mean, he was involved, as larry gibson tells us in "young thurgood" in divorce cases, business disputes, every kind of legal dispute here in baltimore, and then argues dozens of cases in the appellate courts, including in the supreme court. i mean, nobodyz13q before has brought that breadth of experience to the supreme court. it's hard to imagine anybody will in the future because today lawyers are more specialized, right? let me ask the panel, we have such an expert panel here, people have really thought about thurgood marshall? was he an angry man? mick told us about his humor. did the humor mask anger at all the indignities of segregation in baltimore growing up? larry gibson. >> that's a fascinating question. first of all, the answer is no. and i'm not sure why.
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and it may surprise folks because most photographs of him, he's sort of scowling. thurgood marshall wore life loosely.ó÷tñ he had a sense of humor. he got from his father a kind of -- a way of thinking about racial matters in a sort of humorous fashion. no, i think he was focused. he knew what he was about. he was very confident in himself. he had this command of the language. so, i would not describe him as a -- as an angry person. part of it is i think he was a product of -- we're kind of a middle state in so many respects. of course, we're frequently called the most northern southern state, the most
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southern northern state. so, we always had this ambivalent attitude here about a race. and so as the film indicates, his neighborhood was one in which he had many encounters with whites. and the like. he had very decent experiences with white employers. and so thurgood marshall, i think, saw injustice and set about correcting it. and used his home situation here. keep in mind now, the first kind of three major steps he takes towards the -- building in infrastructure are all here in maryland. it was a little further south, he wouldn't have won that case probably. then he brings his first high school case. he loses it. it's the baltimore county high school case, but that begins the
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process that leads ultimately to brown. and then the teacher pay cases. his first success there were three counties here. first montgomery county. that case settles. then calvet county and then ultimately the first federal court decision was in anarona county. so, he saw here in this state a southern state but some potential. and he used it. and then he was just a natural diplomat. as the film points out. he used charm. he had this ability to talk at any level. he had such command of the language that he -- it was like an automatic focusing lens. that he could walk with kings and yet not lose the common touch. he could talk with the average
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uneducated person, but it just -- his language and his tone and his pace changed. it changed geographically. bob carter initially, who was his assistant, thought he got upset when he would see marshall talking with judges and lawyers in the deep south. and he thought for a while that thurgood was sort of faking it. no. this was an automatically focusing lens of a man with amazing control of the language and of his speaking and it just happened automatically. >> have others thought about marshall as he were masking something? anyone else? mick, based on your -- >> i don't think it was masking. i think he used it as a way to deal with it. it was a weapon. he had an arsenal of weapons he used to not get angry. i think he had angry moments. i don't think he was an angry man. he had angry moments. he had to have those. he kept his anger in check with
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like being pragmatic and i need to change the laws and then these people have to follow. and i think you saw his sense of humor as -- it's laugh or cry, right? i have to deal with this. i don't see it as a mask as much as a defense. >> you know, i would say that whether he was angry or not, he had every reason to be angry, right? so, let's just establish that. but i do think that towards the end of his career one did get a sense of deep frustration. you could read it in the lines of his opinion. a delicately structured civil rights infrastructure that was being taken apart bit by bit by bit. >> no question about that. >> he and justify brennan dissenting in case after case -- >> case after case. and seeing a story about what
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the lesson of our history is that is actually the opposite of what the reality is. so, i could only imagine how he would have responded to the parents involved case that basically effectively ended most school desegregation as we know it. and the argument was that white school children and black school children were harmed in the same way by segregation. namely, they both were sent to-to-schools on the basis of their race. so linda brown is harmed the same as little kids walking by who are ensconced in superior schools. that kind of vision was starting while he was on the supreme court. one got the sense that he saw the handwriting on the wall. that this entire infrastructure that had been painstakingly created was starting to come apart. the most hurtful thing he said, i think, because he said something about it, i think we
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as a civil rights constituency were so taken by how easy he made it seem that we thought another african-american judge was going to do the same thing. he gave us a warning at the end saying, you know, doesn't matter what color the reptile is, he said, you know, it's all the same. but people didn't rather it. and people ended up supporting an appointment that unraveled what he created. i can't imagine he would have been happy about that. i can't imagine that this was something that he would -- he just took in stride, particularly at the end of his life. >> well, i would like to -- one of the great privileges in my career is i was co-counsel in cases when he was still sitting as a justice. and i watched the way that he would elegantly answer questions on issues that would generate
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anger, with great precision he would cut immediately to the practical point of the question. and i think that this is how he diffused his anger, by participating and revealing the absurdity of arguments that not humane in the context of the racial history of our country. i do think that towards the end of his career, and i know one of the cases i participated in, the last opinion he wrote on the court overturned a precedent that he participated in. a case called payne versus tennessee. where in a death penalty case, victim impact testimony was reinstated. he was very concerned that we were going to value lifep;r7u b upon the value of the victim. he was very concerned about the possible racial consequences of that. and he was at that point venting that the civil rights infrastructure, as professor crenshaw discussed, was becoming
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unraveled.:úb in fact, he writes an obituary to the unraveling of all the cases that are at risk. i think he delegated his anger to his pen so there could be a legacy to continue. but i think he tried to use humor and precision to unravel the absurdity of those unjusts and immoral things that actually have entered into the racial fabric of our conversation in this country. and that we have yet to remedy. >> let me invite members of the audience who have questions or comments to come up to the microphone. and please identify yurgs. >> hello. i'm a student here at university of baltimore. >> we cannot hear. >> you cannot hear me? let's see. can you hear me now? i will just talk loud.
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i want to address my question to professor gibson. you can expand on why you feel that thurgood marshall would have chosen smith versus allright as one of his cases? because i've seen a monologue of thurgood marshall. one of our professors here at the university of baltimore does an excellent rendition of it. he gave us copies of your book to take and study. so i had an idea -- i had an opportunity to look at some of the cases that he did here. and so when you said that, it struck a cord with me. i wanted to ask you why. >> thurgood would point out that the right to vote is the most powerful tool that a citizen has. and that communities that have political power could then shape the educational power. so i think he thought of it primarily as a power matter of taking away from blacks the
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ability to exercise political power of the south affected everything, including their education. smith versus allright began the process of black political empowerment. keep in mind, what this was was the white primaries, the excluded blacks from voting in primary elections where the primary election was the election. there was no republican presence of any consequence in the south at that point. and the supreme court had in about three decisions backed this notion that political parties were private entities and that selecting their candidates, the 14th amendment, equal protection clause didn't apply. when smith versus allright changed that throughout the south, that began -- it didn't take -- it didn't restore all of
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the voting rights that was taken away but was a major matter. one thing about -- i've been thinking about this anger or not. i remember when i first met thurgood marshall, which was 1975. i went to his house late one night to have him sign a case in an case i was handling. maybe i got him on a good night. i didn't get there -- i got to his house really late. after 11:00. didn't leave until after 2:00 in the morning. he started talking about growing up in baltimore. i had come to believe that he hated the city, that he didn't -- that he was kind of a negative, sour person. he wanted to know>?éó?uq peopl and places and buildings in baltimore. he was a baltimore colts fan. that was a football team back
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then. was just simply a different person from what i had expected. now, that's 1975. as he got older and his health started deteriorating and then there started to be these reversals that has been a mention of some earlier victories, i'm sure all of that had pretty negative impact on him. but as of 1975, he was a much more pleasant person than what i had been led to believe from reading what other people had written about him. >> the questioner referenced our colleague from the university of baltimore college of public affairs. he is himself a marshal scholar and a performer when he does the one-man show based on marshal's life. would you care to come down and not perform your show but offer any thoughts that you had based upon the movie?
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>> thank you very much. thank you, panel. here is my question. first of all, congratulations on a fine film. congratulations to all of you on enlightening us about the many dimensioned of thurgood marshall. one thing that might be helpful for our university of baltimore students who represent all kinds of disciplines is to speak to the way that marshall put together arguably the most integrated legal team in america at the time and brought expertise from all kinds of disciplines and all kinds of races. i think of charlie black. i think of c. van woodward, kenneth clark. could you speak to how he orchestrated all of those pieces in putting these cases together? thank you. >> thank you. i think that one of the great things about marshall is he had a great example in houston of
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using all kinds of people to be part of the legal team. you know, he watch eed charles houston use many white, many jewish lawyers who were working on the naacp to participate in legal cases all throughout the country. so it was nothing unusual for him to seek a broad range of people who were oriented to the cause, not just basically the race but the justice he was trying to seek. so he would put a team together that could get the job done and that had the ability to see the job through. and so when it came time for example, jack greenberg to become the head of the naacp legal team, you know, there was some criticism that, you know, how can a jewish lawyer become the head of the black litigation strategy? well, he took the view that greenberg was qualified to do the job, committed to the job and also had been part of the foundation of the early work
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that had been -- what had been set apart for the cases that had to be done in the next generation of issues. so i think he evaluated people clearly on the content of their character and commitment to the cause. and i think that he would consider race to be what would be called an accident of birth, indeed one of the greatest quotes he made is he said he thought equal rprotection meant the poorest blackest child of a share cropper in mississippi when born and draw its first breath would have the same rights as a rockefeller. no one stated it more beautifully to say that's the ideal of equal protection, that it means equal for everyone. >> so i thought about what it means more than how did he it. as i suggested earlier and i think the film makes clear, the
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most significant legal transformations that took place because of thurgood marshall and charles hamilton houston. and it took place not at the elite law schools in the country. it wasn't the folks at harvard that figured out the conundrum of equal protection. it wasn't the folks at yale that figured out how to have a national strategy to actually dismantle segregation. it was lawyers, historians, sociologists that were pulled together at howard law school. now, why is that significant? number one, it tells you that the traditional intellectual hierarchies that prevailed at the time, that told us that the smartest, the brightest, the best were at these elite institutions were obviously not that smart or bright when it came to the biggest problem america had at the time, which was racial segregation.
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they couldn't identify the problem. they couldn't figure out how to wrap their heads around the problem. they didn't particularly care about the problem. and this is the biggest contradiction in our democracy. so the fact that issue spotting and figuring out how to get at it and do it successfully took place way, way off the main road tells you something about how the main road is actually constituted. so i think the lesson of how he put the team together is that the way we think teams are put together don't really work out in the way that the hierarchy tells us. you look at what people do. you look at what their capacity is by what they're able to accomplish and looked at in that way, the best legal team, the best law school at that time was howard. it was not harvard. it was not yale. we need to think about what that lesson means today. >> it's a great lesson.
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[ applause ] >> really enjoyed the film. >> i'm angela eaves. >> judge. >> yes. i guess we all think about thurgood marshall is mr. civil rights and thinking about race relations here in the united states. but would it be easier -- is it even possible to think of where justice marshall would fall in the stek tr the spectrum of what face us now or first amendment or even gay rights, same-sex marriage? is it possible to -- for any of you to extrapolate his views along those lines? >> great question. professor? >> well, i think one of the
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things that happens because he is such a star with respect to some civil rights that we forget that he was a star with respect to all of them. he wasn't just limited to race. so he was libertarian when it came to sexual autonomy. he was one of the first ones to articulate a sliding scale around the equal protection clause when it comes to gender. one of his most significant frames that i thought was and should be part of the pant onof decisions about gender had to do with the exclusion of women from registration for the draft. and the idea was that if women don't have to fight, you don't need them to be part of the draft. his point was, that's not the question. the question is, do you need to exclude them in order to prepare for the draft? that's a different kind of question. that's a different kind of
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sensibility. and he was one of the first justices to have that sensibility, particularly before the women arrived. so the idea that we have to wonder actually there's evidence about where justice marshall came down on a whole host of issues having to do with equality. expanding it beyond the traditional parameters around race. >> good any predictions about w he would be on federal right to same-sex marriage? >> i think it's absolutely correct that in the finer sense, he was a person for broadest freedom. for example, free speech. lots of his -- just independent of race, just the first amendment, he was very -- he was very strong. he was opposed throughout his life to the death penalty, not
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just the death penalty as it related to black people but death penalty generally. it began with some cases that he handled here in maryland. issues related to rights of workers. a big part of his work, beginning a little bit here in baltimore, but it dealt with workers' rights, reza vee employers. on the full range of progression receive issues, he was on the progressive side. i don't have any hesitancy in thinking th>çj he would be a leader with respect to sexual freedoms and sexual relationships. he was a very strong across the board what we would have called
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a liberal or libertarian, the general word. >> professor anderson? >> i think just an example of his perspective on things, he didn't think the government should participate in the private behavior of almost anything where they didn't need to be participating. just remember oral argument once where the police were arguing that they had this urgent need to search a whole house when they were arresting someone down in the living room because there might be somebody up stairs that wanted to come down and hurt the officer. i remember he said, don't go upstairs. and then another question came out on the same line. but the officers need to make the arrest in a way that they didn't have to fear for what was going to happen to them in a way that made them feel unsafe. he would say -- he

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