Thurgood

Thurgood Marshall:
Some days I'd walk pass the United States Capitol on my way to class. They called Baltimore "Up South". That's just below what we used to call the "Smith & Wesson Line".

Thurgood Marshall:
Now, here was a great human being saying shape up or ship out. Well, I was not going to ship out.

[first lines]

Thurgood Marshall:
Well... we might as well get right down to it.

Thurgood Marshall:
I thought it was president Eisenhower's duty to stand up, to tell the country that Brown is the law of the land! And use his executive power to enforce the decision. But do you know what Ike said when they asked him about it? He said he didn't have an opinion one way or the other. If I could fought World War II the way he fought the civil rights, we'd all be speaking German today.

Thurgood Marshall:
The law is a weapon if you know how to use it.

Thurgood Marshall:
Now, in the spring of 1970, I came down with a bad case of pneumonia, you know, a BAD case of pneumonia. Had to go to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. And word had got out that I was sicker than people realized. Well, a few weeks later I was feeling better. Head of the hospital come in and say "Justice Marshall, we got a request of a report on your condition but I wouldn't dream of releasing it without your permission". I said: "Who wants it?" He said: "President Nixon". I said "Alright, you go ahead and release it, providing you write in great big letters at the bottom: NOT YET, GODAMMIT!". And he did it, too!

Thurgood Marshall:
Martin Luther King. Great leader. But he would dump all his legal work on us, including the bills. Oh, I had a lot of fights with Martin about his theory of disobeying the law. You see, I didn't believe in that. My approach was to use the law... not to break it. I told Martin: "You have two rights: you have the right to disobey the law, you also have the right to go the jail for it". And you know Martin kept talking to me about Henry David Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience. I would remind him, "Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience IN JAIL!".

Thurgood Marshall:
You see, as a boy, I came to understand that two things marked my family: distinctive names and extreme stubbornness.

Thurgood Marshall:
My parents named me after my grandfather Thoroughood. T-H-O-R-O-U-G-H-O-O-D. Well, by second grade I got tired of writing all those letters. I cut it to Thurgood.

Thurgood Marshall:
You remember, General Douglas MacArthur, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away". [audience laughs]