On this day in 1967: Thurgood Marshall, took the oath of office to become the first African American member of the US Supreme Court.

Start:	Oct 2, '09
Location:	Washington, DC

Born the great-grandson of a slave, his original name was Thoroughgood, but he shortened it to Thurgood in second grade because he disliked spelling it. His father, William Marshall, who was a railroad porter, instilled in him an appreciation for the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law.[1] Additionally, as a child in Baltimore, he was punished for his school misbehavior by being forced to write copies of the Constitution, which he later said piqued his interest in the document.

Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson.

Marshall received his law degree from the Howard University School of Law in 1933 where he graduated first in his class. He then set up a private practice in his hometown of Baltimore. The following year, he began working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Baltimore. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, 169 Md. 478 (1936). This involved the first attempt to chip away at Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial discrimination in public places in the United States. Marshall represented Donald Gaines Murray, a black Amherst College graduate with excellent credentials who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of its separate but equal policies. This policy required black students to accept one of three options, attend: Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or out-of-state black institutions. In 1935, Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Murray, showing that neither of the in-state institutions offered a law school and that such schools were entirely unequal to the University of Maryland. Marshall and Houston expected to lose and intended to appeal to the federal courts. However, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled against the state of Maryland and its Attorney General, who represented the University of Maryland, stating "Compliance with the Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the state. Whatever system is adopted for legal education now must furnish equality of treatment now". While it was a moral victory, the ruling had no real authority outside the state of Maryland.

Marshall won his very first U.S. Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940), at the age of 32. That same year, he was appointed Chief Counsel for the NAACP. He argued many other cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully, including Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950). His most famous case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public education was unconstitutional because it could never be truly equal. In total, Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. A group of Democratic Party Senators led by Mississippi's James Eastland held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a recess appointment. Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General.

On June 13, 1967, President Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice Tom C. Clark, saying that this was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Justice by a Senate vote of 69-11 on August 31, 1967. He was the 96th person to hold the position, and the first African-American. President Johnson confidently predicted to one biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, that a lot of black baby boys would be named "Thurgood" in honor of this choice (in fact, Kearns's research of birth records in New York and Boston indicates that Johnson's prophecy did not come true).

Marshall served on the Court for the next twenty-four years, compiling a liberal record that included strong support for Constitutional protection of individual rights, especially the rights of criminal suspects against the government. His most frequent ally on the Court (indeed, the pair rarely voted at odds) was Justice William Brennan, who consistently joined him in supporting abortion rights and opposing the death penalty. Brennan and Marshall concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled four years later that the death penalty was constitutional in some circumstances. Thereafter, Brennan or Marshall dissented from every denial of certiorari in a capital case and from every decision upholding a sentence of death. In 1987, Marshall gave a controversial speech on the occasion of the bicentennial celebrations of the Constitution of the United States. Marshall stated,
"the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today."

In conclusion Marshall stated: "Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights."

Although he is best remembered for his jurisprudence in the fields of civil rights and criminal procedure, Marshall made significant contributions to other areas of the law as well. In Teamsters v. Terry he held that the Seventh Amendment entitled the plaintiff to a jury trial in a suit against a labor union for breach of duty of fair representation. In TSC Industries, Inc. v. Northway, Inc. he articulated a formulation for the standard of materiality in United States securities law that is still applied and used today. In Cottage Savings Association v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, he weighed in on the income tax consequences of the Savings and Loan crisis, permitting a savings and loan association to deduct a loss from an exchange of mortgage participation interests. In Personnel Administrator MA v. Feeney, Marshall wrote a dissent saying that a law that gave hiring preference to veterans over non-veterans was unconstitutional because of its inequitable impact on women.

He retired from the Supreme Court in 1991, and was reportedly unhappy that it would fall to President George H. W. Bush to name his replacement.

Attorney General Plans Reshaping of Civil Rights Division

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/us/politics/01rights.html?_r=1&hp
The Obama administration is planning a revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies that disproportionally affect minorities.

YES WE CAN! - The weak dollar is pushing energy prices higher - HOPE & CHANGE

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9ABTNOG2&show_article=1

LONDON (AP) - The effect of the weak dollar is again pushing oil prices higher in the face of little demand for energy and huge surpluses of crude.

On Friday, the dollar again fell against major currencies.

Since March, the dollar index, which weighs the U.S. currency against a basket of foreign currencies like the euro, the Japanese yen, the pound and the Swiss franc, has fallen nearly 12 percent. In that same period, crude has jumped 81 percent.

Don't feel bad - Here is the Obama Kids Video!

Kennedy Remembered As Civil Rights Champion

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112251970
Sen. Edward Kennedy's skills were never more successful and constant than in the area of civil rights: for minorities, for women, for the disabled and for immigrants.

Over nearly five decades, the Massachusetts Democrat, who died Tuesday at age 77, assumed an increasingly important role in framing the nation's civil rights laws and in leading the opposition to Supreme Court nominees he viewed as hostile to civil rights.

Perhaps it was the NINA — No Irish Need Apply — signs his grandfather told him about in Boston. Perhaps it was the moral legacy left unfinished by his assassinated brothers. Whatever the reason, Kennedy long identified with those who are left out and left behind. Over the course of almost a half-century in the Senate, Kennedy would lead the fight for enactment of a truly astonishing list of civil rights laws.

A Conservative’s Road to Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/us/19olson.html?em
Conservative Supporter of Gay Marriage-- is this a contradiction in terms?

'Do the Right Thing': Still a Racial Rorschach at 20

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/greene_tinson
Article about how when Do The Right Thing came out, Spike Lee was branded as another angry black man and in reviewing the movie, white people almost invariably were upset over the destruction of Sal's pizza place while seemingly ignoring the police-brutality involved in Radio Rahim's choking death. Rorschach, indeed:

Recalling reactions to the film's violent climax, Lee would later remark, "If in a review, a critic discussed how Sal's Famous was burned down but didn't mention anything about Radio Raheem getting killed, it was pretty obvious that he or she valued white-owned property more than the life of this young black hoodlum." The frankness of Lee's rhetoric and the film's content led the mainstream media to label him an angry, confrontational filmmaker. In her 1989 Time review of Do the Right Thing, titled "He's Got to Have It His Way," Jeanne McDowell observed, "Looking for racism at every turn, [Lee] finds it." An August 1990 cover of US asked, "Spike Lee: Why Is He So Angry?" And in a classic example of ironic racism, an October 1992 Esquire headline declared: "Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass."

Two decades and considerable mainstream success have done little to change the portrayal of the director and his films. In a New Yorker profile of Lee published last year, writer John Colapinto describes--and thereby confirms--Lee's reputation as that of "a filmmaker obsessed with race." For Lee the consistency with which his films' messages regarding race are overshadowed by fear and paranoia is frustrating to say the least. He recently observed, "White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window. No black person ever, in twenty years, no person of color has ever asked me why."

The nation decided to ask for some reactions to the 20th anniversary and I found these two particularly interesting:

Jared A. Ball
Morgan State University

Do the Right Thing still relevant? Well, none of Spike's characters likely still live on that block. "Larry Bird" hasn't just stepped on Buggin' Out's new Jordans. He has taken the entire neighborhood. The same killer cops patrol the newly displaced in their now-suburban colonies in precisely the same manner, mildly harassing Harvard professor "Mookies" while killing the everyday Oscar and Sean Raheems. Today, Mookie still bends to pick up the scraps thrown to the ground by his white benefactors; but Love-Daddy can no longer tell us "the truth, Ruth" because he is syndicated by Sal's nobles, assuring that that either a Hot 97 or a hot 50 kills Radios everywhere, in vestibules, cars or while awaiting trains. And worst of all, throughout black America radical change is simply individual, disorganized, stammering signifiers of defeat. Relevant? It is so relevant that nothing of its kind will again grace a mainstream screen.

---

Ed Guerrero
New York University

Regarding the chemistry of the cinematic and the social, the most interesting "thing" about Do the Right Thing is both how little and (perhaps) how much "things" have changed since '89. As I have argued elsewhere, the "new black film wave" started to plateau at the end of the '90s with about twenty or so black-focused or -directed features of varied scale and quality released yearly by the mainstream film industry. Here, nothing has really changed. Accordingly, Do the Right Thing's social themes--police profiling and brutality; urban, ethnic conflict; the crisis in black families and relationships--all endure, if they haven't intensified. Conversely, the "Age of Obama" suggests some remedy to these issues. Yet the rhetorical jujitsu of "race" continues. Note some senators accusing Judge Sotomayor of "racism" during her confirmation hearings, or the "Skip Gates police affair" blowing up and sustained in the national media. Tellingly, we now need many more filmmakers with the cultural, aesthetic creativity and social focus of Spike Lee, as evinced in Do the Right Thing.

it's interesting how a lot of white people were quick to say that we were now in a post racial America after Obama's win (despite what we saw at McCain/Palin rallies). That was put to rest after the racism at the tea parties, the racism with Sotomayor (even before she was nominated!!), the racism at the healthcare town halls, and the absolute backlash against Obama with the Skip Gates stuff - and that was only in the past year! Eric Holder was right.

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition - Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495.html
Interesting perspective

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together."

The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation: "They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance industry."

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

seems the angry left and the uninsured middle are now stepping up to the plate. Hopefully it's not too late.