The Grand Marshall

By Jack E. White

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 fundamental rights as citizens. His great triumph, achieved in 1954, was the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools.

In Williams' richly detailed portrait, Marshall emerges as a born rebel. He showed early talent as a debater and an advocate--at age six he persuaded his mother to simplify the spelling of his name from Thoroughgood--but even more as a class clown and budding playboy. Indeed, it was not until he arrived at Howard University School of Law in 1930 and fell under the spell of its tough-minded dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, that the contours of Marshall's mission began to form.

Williams, the author of Eyes on the Prize, a history of the civil rights movement, recounts the now familiar saga of Marshall's step-by-step assault on Jim Crow as chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But Williams also provides fresh insights into Marshall's ruthless role in the organization's tortured internal politics. Marshall had a hand in ousting not only W.E.B. DuBois, one of the N.A.A.C.P.'s founders, for his ties to communists, but also executive secretary Walter White, for committing the cardinal sin of marrying a white woman.

During his 24 years on the nation's highest court, Marshall never abandoned his commitment to affirmative action and busing for integration. But his zeal and his conviction that he could not be replaced, Williams suggests, led Marshall into the greatest miscalculation of his life. In 1980, when his health began to deteriorate, he rebuffed entreaties from President Jimmy Carter to retire so that a Justice who shared his views could be named to take his place. Instead, Marshall hung on until 1991, when President George Bush selected Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, to fill the vacancy. To Marshall, it was an odious and demeaning selection--"they think [Thomas is] as good as I am," he snapped. In fact, even those who most ardently backed Thomas never really thought he was in Thurgood Marshall's league.

--By Jack E. White