Thurgood Marshall, Gift to the Nation

Fresh from winning the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton ignited a political firestorm over who did the most to bring down the ignominious edifice of segregation. In that now infamous interview with FOX News, she compared the roles Dr. Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson played in this effort, concluding: "but it took a president to get it done."

The Clinton campaign quickly sought to correct the record, giving primary credit to King and the many others who shed blood, sweat, and tears in the Southern streets of Jim Crow. But, it was too late; the damage was done.

Missing from the Obama/Clinton to and fro, however, was a careful consideration of just who the major players in that critical history really were.

Ask anyone on the street, "Who was the great civil rights leader of the 20th century?" and most will mention Dr. King. Indeed, King's contributions are beyond dispute, which is why Hillary "stepped in it" when she appeared to give the leading role to Johnson.

But there is another historical figure whom most on the street are far less likely to mention, but whom historians will tell us ignited the civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s. And, that person is Thurgood Marshall, the man many called "Mr. Civil Rights" -- at least they did so in the 1950s.

MOST WILL remember Marshall for the significance of his appointments in government in the 1960s. LBJ appointed him the nation's solicitor general in 1965 and then to the Supreme Court in 1967. He thereby became the first African-American to achieve such high offices in the executive and judicial branches of our government. This alone makes him a true icon in American history.

But far more significant than his occupational résumé is the legal foundation Marshall laid leading up to the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. As chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Marshall fought for almost two decades in the dangerous but important legal backwoods of civil rights. And it was no small feat that he won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

The pinnacle of Marshall's effort, of course, was the historic and unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which he planned, organized, and successfully argued before the high court.

It is hard to imagine the Brown decision, however, without Marshall's dogged fight to enforce the "equal" in the "separate but equal" the Supreme Court had injected into our legal system with its disgraceful 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

And it is hard to imagine the civil rights movement itself without the Brown decision. Would we have had a Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, Malcolm X, the 1963 march on Washington and the "I have a dream" speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and much more without Brown plus the critically important legal foundation Marshall laid in the 1930s and 1940s?

THE TRUE jewel in Marshall's crown, however, is the role Brown played in restoring the 14th Amendment to its proper place in our Constitution. Brown was historically pivotal, not just for African-Americans, but for all Americans. The 14th is the constitutional bulwark that protects the rights of all who face discrimination due to their race, color, religious orientation, sexual preference, or other reasons.

Prior to Brown the states and localities had escaped the full restraint of the 14th and, therefore, the controlling force of the Bill of Rights. With Brown, Marshall and his team made America constitutionally whole. By enshrining the 14th in its rightful place, Brown reconnected our nation to 1776, to the bedrock principle upon which our great Republic was founded: "that all men are created equal."

Thus we can well understand why Marshall's nemesis, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist -- who opposed Marshall in so many cases in their shared time together on the high court -- placed Marshall at the pinnacle of American jurisprudence. Eulogizing Marshall at his funeral, Rehnquist referred to the words above the entrance to the Supreme Court that read "Equal Justice Under Law" and ironically said of Marshall: "Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall."

No truer words could be offered about a man who did as much as any one individual in American history to restore equal justice under the law.

Today marks not only Abraham Lincoln's birth, but appropriately the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well -- for which Marshall was the chief counsel during the critical '40s and '50s. Surely we must this year and this month pay tribute to Thurgood Marshall -- the great, lone constitutional warrior for civil rights who, without any doubt, belongs at the side of Dr. King in the pantheon of civil rights greats.

Roice D. Luke is a professor in VCU's Department of Health Administration. Contact him at .