Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect

ED EDWIN: Testing, one, two, three, four.

Testing, one, two, three, four.

This is an interview with Justice Thurgood Marshall in his chambers in the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on February 15th, 1977.

CHARLES GORDONE: This is Harlem, Harlem has always had the reputation of being a place of music, gaiety, and excitement, but to us it has another meaning, here only Negroes live.

How did this come about?

The Negro was brought from Africa to be sold into slavery.

A century ago, slavery was abolished.

But a pattern of segregation took its place.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: This was a dark hour indeed.

And the sun would not come out for a very long time.

MIKE WALLACE: Our first guest tonight is the man who argued and won a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, which has affected millions of Americans, who formerly had second-class citizenship.

He is the chief counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thurgood Marshall.

SHERYLL D. CASHIN: Thurgood Marshall, he's the only Supreme Court Justice in the history of the court who was more famous for what he did before rising to justice.

He spent six decades of his life committed to making the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equality real.

WIL HAYGOOD: Legally speaking, he is one of the Founding Fathers.

SHERRILYN IFILL: We all know that after the Civil War, Congress ratified three Amendments that we think of as the Reconstruction Amendments or the Civil War Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 15th Amendment said that you cannot deny the right to vote based on race the 14th Amendment is kind of the centerpiece of it.

CASHIN: The 14th Amendment was designed to wrap Black people in citizenship and having the same rights that white people do.

IFILL: This was created for the purpose of overturning the Dred Scott case, which had made Black people stateless people cause the Supreme Court in Dred Scott said that Black people could not be citizens.

But we also know that there was the backlash and that Reconstruction unraveled within 20 years, culminating in the 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson decision in which the Supreme Court said separate but equal is constitutional, which basically pardoned the concept of Jim Crow, which we lived with for 70 years thereafter.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Nor were the advocates of white supremacy content to have all the wealth and all the votes and all the laws on their side.

The Klan was revived, lynching increased extraordinary numbers, and race riots erupted all over the country.

GILBERT KING: The law has been the first part of the Civil Rights Movement.

Before somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. came along, you had to sue for the right to do what Martin Luther King Jr. was doing.

HAYGOOD: There is no one in this country who hasn't been touched by Thurgood Marshall's genius.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: What is striking to me is the importance of law and determining the condition of the Negro.

Just realize he was ineffectively enslaved by a law which declared him a chattel of his master.

He was emancipated by law and then disenfranchised and segregated by law, and finally, he is beginning to win equality by law.

EDWIN: Sir, to begin in the beginning.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Well, I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, which I have considered to be way up South, July 2, 1908, in the middle of the Negro area, Northwest Baltimore.

JOHN MARSHALL: He loved Baltimore.

Excuse me, I should say Bal-more.

He used to correct me all the time about how you pronounce it.

THE HONORABLE ROBERT BELL: Baltimore itself was a very segregated town.

Downtown is where you would see all of the indicia of segregation.

MARSHALL: But as far as his block, the neighborhood he grew up in was an African American neighborhood.

BELL: We had, on our side of town, movie theaters, they were all Black.

Grocery stores, markets, furniture stores, clothing stores, doctors, lawyers, ministers.

We all lived within the same confines.

There was a neighborhood feeling.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: I went to, of course, the all-Negro Elementary School, or what was known as Division Street, a short walk from where I was born.

And this is almost unbelievable, but there were two big grocery stores in Baltimore, and one of them was owned by each one of my grandfathers.

My grandfather on my mother's side, the basement door was left open and the poor Negroes had access to go down in to get wood, coal, and vegetables and stuff, and he would tell them, "Now don't take more than you need."

And my other grandfather did the exact same thing.

CECILIA MARSHALL: Well, everyone thinks when they hear Thurgood Marshall, like of maybe fame and fortune.

He grew up in an amazing community in Baltimore, and it was a very humble family that he came from.

My great-grandmother was a teacher, taking care of all these children and educating them.

My great-great-grandfathers were grocers, ensuring that the community was fed.

It's amazing to think about making sure that we took care of each other.

MARSHALL: My grandfather worked at two jobs.

Worked on the train as a porter and at an exclusive all-white country club.

But when he wasn't working, he would take my dad and my dad's older brother to the court in Baltimore to hear cases going to court.

He was very impressed with watching lawyers argue cases.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Now, you want to know how I got involved in law, I don't know.

The nearest I can get is that my dad, my brother, and I would have the most violent arguments you've ever heard about anything.

When we were away in college, and we would come back the first dinner we'd have, the neighbor, Mrs. Hall, would tell her husband, she said, "Ah, the boys are home."

I went to college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

It's about 60 miles above Baltimore on Route One.

And that was a practically all Negroes college of about 300 and some students.

PRESIDENT BRENDA ALLEN: In the early days of the institution, the majority of the faculty who taught here were from Princeton, either from the undergraduate college or from the seminary.

And so everything about Lincoln mimicked Princeton, the full curriculum in the focus on essential skills, especially communication skills.

We were the Black version of Princeton when African Americans could not go to those schools.

DR. IRVING JOYNER: Coming out of the enslavement period, there was this notion that African Americans would not be able to gain a higher education in white institutions and that it was necessary for African Americans to provide for themselves, to educate themselves.

HBCUs became the engine to advance in a society that did not want us, did not need us, and was looking for a way to keep us oppressed and back in the enslavement mindset and the enslavement reality.

ALLEN: Lincoln sits about five miles from the Mason-Dixon line.

So when we started, we were very close to the slave state, which was Maryland.

Even though we were a free state, the racism was rampant, and we had this free Black community with a very active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan very close.

To believe that you can start a school like Lincoln, offer baccalaureate degrees focusing on rigorous liberal arts in 1854 when most African Americans were in bondage, was about freedom.

I think one of the most important things to know about Justice Marshall's time at Lincoln is directly related to the culture in the community of Lincoln.

One of the key characteristics of a Lincoln man, especially in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, was eloquent.

That you're able to stand up in front of a group and be persuasive in the context of really rigorous, critical thinking, problem-solving research.

CECILIA MARSHALL: There's just a lot of pride around Lincoln.

Kwame Nkrumah, this man who changed Ghana, and Langston Hughes.

These men were in the same academic building together, these giants.

ALLEN: There was this paper done by Langston Hughes in their sociology class, asking the student body about how they would feel about having more Black faculty here at Lincoln.

And he found that more than two-thirds of the student body felt like it would not be good.

CASHIN: I was shocked when he told me that initially, he had voted against it.

I could not believe it, and it really spoke to how much you absorb if you grow up in Jim Crow, where you would question the ability of Black people to educate you.

ALLEN: And Langston Hughes wrote about how he felt those answers really reflected some level of self-loathing and argued to bring more Black history, more Black literature into the curriculum here at the university to teach its Black men to love themselves and love their culture.

MARSHALL: His days at Lincoln and Langston Hughes formed the foundation that he needed throughout his life.

He got Lincoln and Howard Law School.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: I went over to Howard in 1930 and began the law school, and for the first time in my life, I studied.

Dean Charles H. Houston, H-O-U-S-T-O-N, was very brilliant, very decent person, but a very hard man.

He himself was a perfectionist, and he insisted that we each be, and if we did a slipshod job, boy, he would lay it on you.

CASHIN: Charles Hamilton Houston tells his students, you will be basically a social activist using the law, or you will be a parasite.

He wanted it to be an engine of change for the race.

Houston embodied the two critical characteristics of a classic race man: one, an utter confidence in himself and his people.

You will be excellent, you will work hard, you will excel, you will be the best of the best.

And the second was simply this agitator's creed, and you will take that talent, and you will use it to improve the lives of other people.

KING: Charles Hamilton Houston just said your briefs have to be perfect, you cannot let down the race by doing something that wasn't at the level of what I expect from you.

IFILL: Houston has a vision of what can be created at Howard Law School.

Not just some attorneys who can go into Black communities and work, because of course, segregation meant that we needed to have some Black doctors and some Black lawyers and so forth, but that lawyers can see themselves as having this power to transform to be social engineers, as he would say.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: We started just sitting around with Charles Houston, and we began to work out this attack on the segregated school system.

We talked about it, we did research on it, we studied it.

CASHIN: The vision was to push these talented young lawyers into litigating to change the world.

And Thurgood Marshall drank that Kool-Aid, and he worked harder than he ever had in his life, and he ended up being the valedictorian.

He ended up going straight into practicing law with Charles Hamilton Houston, they basically invented the modern civil rights firm.

IFILL: The idea of the lawyer who spent 100% of their time working on civil rights cases was a 20th-century innovation brought to us by Thurgood Marshall and later the team that he developed at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

CASHIN: The Legal Defense Fund, they are a public-interest law firm.

They file lawsuits on behalf of individuals and groups that are facing some kind of oppressive situation, and they do it through fundraising; they don't charge their clients.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: When I went to the NAACP in '36, I got 2,400 a year.

No retirement money, no nothing.

And a lot of people have left NAACP because of the travel.

KING: Thurgood Marshall, when he's just starting out with the NAACP, he just arrives from Baltimore, and he's working with Charles Hamilton Houston really on a shoestring budget, and at one point, they decide to do this road trip down south.

They bring a movie camera, and they're they are going to document what these segregated schools in the Jim Crow South were like.

IFILL: These schools that Charles Hamilton Houston and Marshall and the team saw in the south are up on concrete blocks, there were line pits for students to relieve themselves, or there was only an old stove to warm the school.

They had no ventilation, all the things one might expect of prison barracks during war.

KING: And I think it was extraordinarily eye-opening to Thurgood Marshall to see that inequality firsthand.

HAYGOOD: The law as we know it now is important for Black people because of the foundation of slavery.

CASHIN: The 14th Amendment was designed to overrule Dred Scott, in which, infamously, Roger Taney said Black people had no rights which whites were bound to respect.

The 14th Amendment was saying yes, they do.

Thurgood Marshall brought that perspective, okay, we have this beautiful idea, now we need to make the structures of America make that true for people.

So we need to dismantle cash structures that basically keep certain people down and other people up.

HAYGOOD: Thurgood had to look around the country and see all these laws, and since the laws were justified in court, he had to unjustify those laws.

IFILL: Marshall, whose mother was a teacher, was very much aware of education issues.

And the early part of the work around education was focused on trying to make sure that Black schools had the resources they need.

Maryland, South Carolina, all over the place.

We're in a public school system, and Black teachers are paid a fraction of what white teachers are paid.

JOYNER: But African American teachers were academically superior to the white teachers.

We had teachers who had master's degrees, Ph.D.'s who were stuck because of discrimination at the high school level and junior high school level.

IFILL: And Marshall understood that this was not just about the education system but about the economic system that was holding Black people back.

This was money in the pockets of Black people every week.

CASHIN: This is where he cemented his celebrity and got known as "Mr. Civil Rights" because it was like the circus coming to town.

KING: You would have Black people come from miles and miles away to sit up in those Jim Crow balconies, and watch a Black man in a suit arguing law with white people.

And you'd see these bigoted white prosecutors kind of be enamored with Marshall.

He was a spectacle.

HAYGOOD: Black folk, they would sometimes ride into the local courthouse on mules and horses.

The night before, they would pack a lunch.

They wanted their sons and daughters to see this Black figure; it was like he had dropped from heaven.

CASHIN: Whatever was going on, people said, "Don't worry, Thurgood's coming."

JOYNER: In the '40s and '50's the state of North Carolina had a state department of education that controlled and ran all of the schools.

Because of the success that the NAACP was having around the country, North Carolina decentralized its school system to 100 different counties.

If the NAACP was to succeed, they would have to succeed now, in county by county.

This is one of the ploys that they would use because they could not match the firepower that the NAACP was able to bring around the country, and every time they won a case in any part of the country the legislator in North Carolina was on top of it and let's see how we can keep them from doing that here.

IFILL: You want to be in a situation where those who oppose you, fear you, or would rather not tangle with you, let's put it that way.

HAYGOOD: It psychologically put the legal establishment on notice... Thurgood is coming.

JOYNER: African Americans school teachers now were receiving pay similar to similarly situated whites, and they were the upper middle class in our communities, but those decisions were not made to benefit us; they were made to keep these segregated schools in place so that African Americans would not then fight to get into the white institutions.

They wanted to keep us out.

That was the focus the political focus, the social focus, the cultural focus of those whites that ran government at that point.

They did not realize, I think, that by having these African American schools, which were basically controlled by African Americans that they were then providing a training ground for African Americans to participate in the democratic process because it was in those schools that there were votes taken, there were policy decisions being made.

So those individuals then left North Carolina and went to New York, and left North Carolina and went to Philadelphia, and went to New Jersey.

When they arrived there, they were politically conscious, and they then began to participate in the political activities in those locations.

They could vote, and they did vote because voting was the hallmark of citizenship within this country.

EDWIN: What were the cases that you became involved in that you feel had meant the most?

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Well, the primary case in Texas, Smith against Allwright was, I think, the first real big one I had.

HAYGOOD: Smith v Allwright, that was a case out of Texas in the Democratic all-white primary.

CASHIN: In Texas and in most southern states, whoever won the primary was going to win the general, and they had a system that limited the primary voting to whites.

HAYGOOD: And if those whites only wanted a segregationist to win, well then the deed was done because by the time the main voting date was set, if you could get past the poll tax, then you still didn't have any choice but to vote for that person who had been anointed via the all-white primary.

KING: The interesting thing with Thurgood Marshall is a lot of times he would go into cases like this, and he knew full well that he was going to lose.

The home-field advantage to the state was too powerful to overcome.

But for him, the strategy was to make sure they kept a really accurate record so that they could appeal it to a higher court.

That he felt was a level playing field.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: There had been four previous cases and Negroes still weren't voting in the primary and Chief Judge Hutches, Hutcheson I think it was, he drafted the first white primary law to keep Negroes out so I mean I knew where his heart was and he started in on his questioning and he questioned me about the qualification for voters, step by step, back, back, back.

He had me on my feet for three hours.

And he ruled against it.

I said, "Well, I'm going to Supreme Court."

He said, "Of course."

And I saw him a couple of months later, and he said, "Have you filed your petition for Writ of Certiorari yet?"

I said, "No, sir."

He said, "Why don't you hurry up?

You know you're going to win."

And, we brought it up here, and we did, we won it.

CASHIN: I suspect part of the reason why he was most proud of that was his understanding that Black freedom really depended on functioning democracy in which Blacks had a voice.

HAYGOOD: There were many, many similar cases that Thurgood Marshall fought for at the Supreme Court and won.

And the way he would bring those cases is he would look across the landscape and he would say, "Well, there is a problem over there.

There is a housing problem, maybe I can zero in on that.

There is a school case over in Topeka, Kansas.

I can get that before the justice system."

It was painstaking.

It was painstaking work, but Thurgood Marshall never let the goal out of sight.

IFILL: Marshall would see a racist ad for peppermint candy in a newspaper, and he would write a letter to the editor saying, "This is" you know, "Filled with the most grotesque racial stereotypes."

You know, if he saw it, his hand was in it.

For Marshall, it was that sense that you were full-on defender of the dignity of Black people.

At all times.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: The school cases, of course, were going along.

Meantime, we're having about one a year, good criminal cases on confessions, the jury trial, and things like that.

And, I investigated every race riot from 1940 until I left, and some of them were rough.

The one in '45, as I remember.

When a radio repairman struck a Negro woman, who called him a liar.

And, as a result, her son, a teenager, knocked the white man down and beat him up.

And the mob came down to the Negro section of town to work it over, and the Negroes fired back.

And that night, the National Guard came in, surrounded the Negro neighborhood, which was called Mink Slide, M-I-N-K Slide.

And set up .50 caliber machine guns and just, I mean, it was horrible, they just, these wooden houses, they just went through them like that.

I don't know how many people got killed.

But it ended up, the one white man got killed and the whole gang of Negroes were charged with murder.

And we went down to try that case, and uh, the mob got me one night, and uh, they were taking me down to the river where all of the white people were waiting to do a little bit of lynching.

MARSHALL: The vehicle got stopped, and they took him out of the vehicle, and they were taking him to lynch him.

Luckily, you know his, all of his people that he was working with, and the local people who were looking out for him; they knew what was happening, and they just got as many people as they could and went to that site to stop them.

But my dad vividly remembers seeing the noose and knew it was for him.

KING: He'd go on the road into these hostile environments.

Here he was, getting chased around by the Klan and having to stay in different houses each night so that the night riders wouldn't get to him.

Bombs were being thrown through front windows.

CASHIN: He told stories of people coming to the front yard with guns, and he always used to say, "I'm a chicken" you know "I'd go out the back door."

KING: They would often joke around about who was gonna have the front room because that's usually the room where the Molotov cocktail would land.

They would ask each other, you know, "What kind of box do you want to be shipped home after we're killed down here?"

HAYGOOD: He had to hide out in people's homes, hide in the woods.

Year after year after year after year, until he broke the system.

KING: I was going through Thurgood Marshall's files, and I saw this letter from a lawyer in Florida saying, "Thurgood, we need help.

Please notify the Department of Justice, the FBI, this is a dangerous case."

You pick it up and it's, you know, handwritten.

You can feel the desperation.

Thurgood Marshall took this extraordinarily dangerous case where these four Black men are accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.

She said initially that it was too dark, she couldn't recognize them.

But then you had a sheriff come in, Sheriff Willis McCall, and he basically said, "Yeah, I know who it was.

I'll take it from here."

And he started rounding up Black people that he had problems with.

The Groveland Boys, they arrest them, they take them into the basement of the courthouse, basically handcuff them to pipes, and just beat them senseless until they confess.

Before 1940, coerced confessions were completely legal.

And these men are fighting for their lives.

They're gonna be facing the death penalty.

IFILL: This case is emblematic of a system of terror that holds Black people, not only making them subject to violence, but the impunity of it.

The feeling that this thing has happened to us, and there's nothing we can do about it.

That's the condition of Black people in many of these Southern towns through the '30s and the '40s.

KING: White supremacy, you see it at every stage of this trial.

Somebody like Willis McCall could not exist unless powerful people had his back and allowed him to continue this.

After the Supreme Court decision overturning the Groveland case, the sheriff, Willis McCall, took it upon himself to execute the defendants.

Sam Shepherd was killed instantly.

He was handcuffed to his best friend, Walter Irvin, who was shot three times but survived.

He was laying there with his eyes closed, and he hears a deputy standing next to McCall say, "This one ain't dead yet."

and he opens his eyes, and he's staring down the barrel of a .38 caliber gun.

And he sees the flash, and the bullet goes clean through his neck.

I think about this a lot, like, if Walter Irvin had died on the side of that road like he should have, the official narrative that lingers is that these convicted rapists tried to escape and kill our fine sheriff, and fortunately, he was able to defend himself, and let's move on.

In that hospital room, Marshall was there, his lawyers were there, the FBI was in there, and Walter Irvin started telling the story of his execution of his best friend, and his shooting.

Walter Irvin told a story of cold-blooded murder.

Now, the horrible thing is Walter Irvin, in the retrial, he is the only one left.

He's convicted, he gets sentenced to the life in prison, and Sheriff Willis McCall was asked by a journalist, "Do you think that this shooting is going to impact your chances for re-election?"

and he just kind of laughed and said, "This'll probably get me elected six more times."

He was wrong about that; he got elected seven more times.

IFILL: It's so hard, I think, for people to understand the level of terror millions of Black people lived under during this period and how little recourse there was for it.

People tend to talk about LDF's work as impact litigation, which it is.

Sometimes we just take cases because it's just too awful, and you cannot turn away from the truth of it.

KING: Thurgood Marshall, in his role as the director of the LDF, he would often get these lynching photographs that would come in.

Marshall saw probably more than anyone else.

But there was one photograph that really haunted Marshall.

That particular photograph, it wasn't the bulging eyes, it wasn't the rope that was cutting into the neck.

It was the faces of these young white children who were smiling and posing around a dangling corpse.

He would wake up in cold sweats at night thinking that someday, his time was gonna come.

He was going to be lynched, and the children would come out in their Sunday best and celebrate it around his body.

Thurgood Marshall, he had a lot of resistance, even within the NAACP.

Like saying, Thurgood, we have all this civil rights litigation that's coming in the pipeline.

You're invaluable to the Civil Rights Movement.

We can't risk you going out and doing these death penalty cases in the dangerous antebellum South.

Well, it turned out in the Groveland case that he got so much coverage, media coverage, that all of this money began flowing into the NAACP, money that they'd never had before.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that Brown versus Board was really funded on the back of the Groveland case.

EDWIN: These various approaches.

You weigh them about the same or differently depending on whether you're trying to get an admission into graduate school, whether you're trying to get equal teacher's salaries, whether you're trying to get equal facilities, is any one of those more significant?

THURGOOD MARSHALL: No, you're whittling away, you're cutting it down.

You see, we were always looking for that one case to end all of it.

We recognize there is a terrific problem, and now is the time to get around to having our Constitution apply to all sections of the country equally and to the same effect in a more or less uniform fashion.

KING: When he did the Brown versus Board case.

He was able to bring in historians, sociologists, legal consultants, Supreme Court clerks.

He was so thorough and so complete in his work.

Nobody could see it any other way.

REPORTER: In a unanimous decision, the nine Supreme Court justices ruled racial segregation in publicly supported schools to be unconstitutional.

ANNOUNCER: The Supreme Court rules in 1954 that people cannot be segregated by law on the basis of race.

It is a far-reaching ruling.

HAYGOOD: 1954, Brown v Board of Education happened to have been the year that I was born.

So, I often picture my mother going over to the bassinets, 'cause she had twins, me and a twin sister.

And even psychologically, she could say to her two just-born babies, "Hey, the world's gonna change and you're gonna be able to experience", in theory now, "what all of the white children in the country are experiencing."

THURGOOD MARSHALL: It was a unanimous decision and has the broadest possible language, which should set for rest once and for all the problem as to whether or not second-class citizenship segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.

HAYGOOD: Brown v. Board of Education desegregated the public school system, but it did more than that, of course.

It showed all white America that they needed to start thinking of Blacks as fellow citizens, first-class citizens, and not second-class citizens going through certain doors, using certain bathrooms.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: We have a five-point program already in effect, which will clean up and end segregation on the cultures in the South.

And then we're going to the bus transportation area.

The health program because Negroes in the hospitals without segregation.

IFILL: When Brown was decided in 1954, it was a huge, powerful win for sure, but we all know what came immediately after.

ANNOUNCER: The White Citizens' Councils have promised to picket on the opening day of school.

GEORGE WALLACE: I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

CASHIN: Brown stimulates massive resistance across the South.

In Virginia, many counties just shut public schools down rather than being forced to integrate.

J. LINDSAY ALMOND: There is no mixing of the races in the public schools of Virginia, and there is no turmoil, no confusion, no chaos as a result of that.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Delay cannot be occasioned simply because of disagreement of some people with the decision of the court.

I had thought, we had all thought, that once we got the Brown case, the thing was going to be over.

That was when we should have sat down and planned.

The other side did.

The other side planned all these delaying tactics they could think of.

And so they took the initiative, and we ended up blocking their blocking tactics.

By that time, we'd lost all of our initiative.

IFILL: His belief, was that law was going to do it.

So imagine winning in 1954 and then litigating desegregation cases in every county because there's resistance happening.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: The Supreme Court can't go around from county to county and state to state, to enforce it.

Under our American form of government, the one thing that Negroes rely on to hold their strength and faith in their government against other people constantly pulling on them is the belief and the, the, the supported belief that they can get justice in the court.

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: The people who have this big emotional reaction on the other side were not acting over these past three generations in defiance of law; they were acting in compliance with the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States under the decision of 1896.

Now that has been completely reversed, and it is going to take time for them to adjust their thinking and their progress.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: If you look back, you might get the idea that we put some trust in the decency of man, maybe.

So I say, I think the major blame was on us in not pushing, not planning, and letting it go by default, I guess.

IFILL: Marshall says, if there's one thing I think we did wrong, it was after the decision, we didn't fully sit down and strategize how to deal with what would likely be resistance.

We didn't believe that the resistance would be as strong as it was.

I think it's perfectly fine to underestimate virulent white supremacy.

I think every Black person, one day or another, has underestimated how virulently white supremacy exists in this country.

EDWIN: You mentioned last time that you wanted to talk about Little Rock.

Would you like to talk about Little Rock this morning?

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Well, Little Rock was rough.

It was rough in all kinds of ways.

LEE CONEY: Do you have any idea that you will be able to get the students in this fall semester?

THURGOOD MARSHALL: I have every hope that it can be done, and I reasonably expect that it will be done.

We went down there to try the case, and you never knew what would happen the next day or indeed the next hour.

CONEY: Mr. Marshall, do you have any comment on this extraordinary action of these lawyers walking out, have you ever seen that happen before?

THURGOOD MARSHALL: I've never seen that happen before; that's the only comment.

That was one of the toughest ones we had.

We had to come up here to the Supreme Court, I don't know how many times.

Back and forth, and eventually, we persuaded Eisenhower to send those troops down.

I didn't think he would, but he did.

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: We are a nation in which laws, not men, are supreme.

Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

ANNOUNCER: To the eyes of the world, the fact of violence tended to obscure the true meaning of Little Rock.

Its importance was that it demonstrated to those who opposed integration that they would ultimately have to give way.

Negroes rights would be upheld by the federal government.

MARSHALL: I remember once we were sitting on the train to go to New York, and my dad got very quiet.

I'll never forget it, he got very quiet.

And I looked at them and there was a tear coming down from his eye, and he said, as I look out this window, I'm reminded of all the times, all the trains I rode.

After he would leave town, and those people that protected him.

He said I can see them clear as day.

And he felt guilty.

But ultimately, he would always call those people the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.

The people who may have lost their jobs because of those cases, may have lost their homes because of those cases, and may have been hurt or worse because they felt the need to stand up for their rights.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: There was a change from the legal movement in the courts to the protest movement in the streets.

IFILL: Marshall had worked his entire career as a lawyer, had had remarkable success as a lawyer, so he had seen what law could do.

But if you think about what Marshall considered his greatest win, which was, by the way, not Brown, but, was Smith v. Allwright in 1944, the Texas white primary case.

We don't have a Voting Rights Act 'til 1965.

So he wins a case in 1944, and Black people still around the South cannot vote, and he talks about how the voting piece wouldn't have happened without the protesting and activism.

MAN: What we're talking about is the possibility of spending your Christmas in jail.

BELL: The whole point of the protest was to provide a vehicle by which one could argue a particular result based on the Constitution.

The lawyer's job was to ensure that that position was presented in the courts, and hopefully get the right result.

If they couldn't get that result, then of course, they were trying to keep the people out of jail.

Then you had other people who were engaged in raising the money for bail and that kind of thing, and you had others who were strategizing what issues to raise, and where to raise them.

And then the others, like students, were out there carrying it out.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: I got in touch with the students that were picketing and pledged the entire support of the Legal Defense Fund to protect their legal rights.

We even set up a huge bail fund in order to assure that they would not go to jail.

IFILL: LDF under Thurgood Marshall's leadership, and then subsequently under Jack Greenberg's leadership, however they were torn about the docket of cases that they had; they were there.

They represented the marchers in Selma, they represented Albany, Georgia, they represented King in Birmingham.

When there are changes happening in your country, when there's unrest, when there's unfairness, people look to lawyers for the answer.

So law and lawyers are very important tools in the toolbox of the very long, many hundred years quest of Black people to be free and full citizens in this country.

Now, it is not exclusive of protest, of boycott, of scholarship, of journalism.

Black people have needed all of those things, of art, to forge a path of liberation.

But, none of it works without law.

HAYGOOD: I think it's just an astounding goal that he set for himself, to break apart laws and then stitch the Black family into the fabric of the American flag.

CASHIN: He successfully argued, not just Brown, but 32 cases before the Supreme Court, and won 29 of them, and many of those victories knocked down planks of Jim Crow.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: It's really good to be back in Africa.

We arrived in the Ivory Coast and Abidjan last Friday.

HAYGOOD: Marshall took from the '60s, the legal activism blueprint, and went to Africa and helped several African nations write their constitution.

BELL: He was appointed to the Second Circuit in 1961.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: This morning, we gather here in the Cabinet Room to salute Thurgood Marshall, the new Solicitor General of the United States.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Thank you very much.

EDWIN: Did you think that President Johnson was serious when he said Solicitor General would be really the end of the line?

THURGOOD MARSHALL: Yeah, yeah, he said it.

At least two out of every three times I talked to him at least that many times.

And he convinced me at least.

ANNOUNCER: Historians will note this hour at the White House in a Rose Garden ceremony, at 58-year-old great-grandson of a slave is nominated by President Johnson to be a Supreme Court justice.

He is Solicitor General, Thurgood Marshall, acknowledged the best-known Negro lawyer of the century.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: He had the press out there waiting in the Rose Garden, and he carried me out and announced it, and then we came back in the Oval Room, and I said, "Mr. President, now look.

They're going to get that on the wire in about a minute.

Now, can I call my wife so she won't hear it on..." He said, "You mean you haven't told Cissy yet?"

I said, "No.

How could I?

I've been with you all the time."

The President said, "Cissy, this is Lyndon Johnson."

She said, "Yes, Mr.

President."

He said, "I just put your husband on the Supreme Court."

And Cissy said, "I sure am glad I'm sitting down."

HAYGOOD: During his confirmation hearings, you have Newark, New Jersey, that's on fire, Harlem is on fire, Detroit is on fire, and a lot of the faces are faces of Black people.

Marshall had to go up against that and convince Southern democrats that he knew what law and order meant.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: I'm certain that there is no possible reason that I could have to not adequately represent this government, which is, after all, my government.

Just as it is all of our government.

HAYGOOD: It seemed like his whole life had become crystallized during those hearings because he became kind of the resident scholar to teach America what it meant to be Black.

ANNOUNCER: Thurgood Marshall, the first negro to serve on the United States Supreme Court, puts on his robes with the assistance of his wife.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Hello.

CECILIA MARSHALL: President Johnson.

JOHNSON: Yes.

CECILIA MARSHALL: Cissy Marshall.

JOHNSON: Yes, Mrs. Marshall.

CECILIA MARSHALL: Now that I have stopped trembling a little and now that we're more or less legal, I thought I'd like to call you and thank you again so much for the faith you have shown in Thurgood and so much that you have done for everybody.

JOHNSON: Well, I know he'll be very worthy of it, and I know that both of us would be proud of him.

CECILIA MARSHALL: Thank you so much again.

HAYGOOD: Before Thurgood, there had not been a robust conversation about the majesty of civil rights laws.

IFILL: There is a vested interest in advancing the narrative that the work of civil rights is like getting goodies for Black people, when in fact it is a democracy project and always has been.

CASHIN: Thurgood Marshall, in front of the bench, was arguing to basically end caste.

Thurgood Marshall, on the bench, had a vision of universal equality.

So, here we have a race man who has a race-transcending jurisprudence.

HAYGOOD: He stands as a very ethical justice.

Thurgood wanted you to know where he stood and why he stood where he stood.

BELL: And he never changed his focus because his focus was to ensure that the Constitution meant what the Constitution said and could never be perceived to be otherwise.

And he believed that that was his mission, even when he was not able to convince the others.

He means the difference between remaining where we were and being where we are.

The progress that we've made, I think.

GORDONE: The long and heroic struggle of negro and white alike against the evils of race prejudice is one of the greatest efforts in our nation's history.

It has brought the American negro to real heights of heroism and splendid achievement.

We have broken many shackles and won our way to the frontlines of our national artistic, athletic, and intellectual endeavors.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: To those of us who know the struggle is far from over, history has another lesson: it tells us how deeply rooted habits of prejudice are, dominating the minds of men and all our institutions for three centuries, and it cautions us to continue to move forward, lest we fall back.

IFILL: Two or three generations have grown up without Jim Crow and without the rampages of lynching, and the more explicit manifestations of white supremacy.

People may believe that this is just how it is when it isn't.

It was fought for, and it was created and developed and undergirded.

The work and life of Thurgood Marshall literally changed this country in ways that were incredibly positive and powerful and that still resonate today.

HAYGOOD: He had to envision that America could be better than it was acting.

He made America, America.

THURGOOD MARSHALL: We have certainly not reached the point I would have hoped we could reach.

We have had setbacks, even, but what we are proud of in the United States is that we are making progress.

We've got movement toward it.

(music plays through credits) "Becoming Thurgood" is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video