rights, because he used the lever of the law and the Constitution
to propel his countrymen and women into a new era in which
America came closer to its cherished ideals.
To those of my generation, growing up in the segregated
South, Thurgood Marshall was more than a crusader for justice,
more than a torchbearer of liberty, more than a wise and learned
man of the law.
He was a teacher who taught us to believe in the shield of jus-
tice and the sword of truth; a role model whose career made us
dream large dreams and work to secure them; an agent of change
who transformed the way an entire generation thought of itself,
of its place in our society, and of the law itself.
Picture, if you will, the inescapable power of the beacon light
Thurgood Marshall beamed into our cramped and constricted
community—a community in which the law ordained that we
could only attend segregated, inferior schools; a community in
which the law ordained that our parents be denied the right to
vote; a community in which the law ordained segregation in the
courtroom and exclusion of our parents from the jury box.
It was Thurgood’s mission to turn these laws against them-
selves, to cleanse our tattered Constitution and our besmirched
legal system of the filth of oppressive racism, to restore to all
Americans a Constitution and a legal system newly alive to the
requirements of justice.
By demonstrating that the law could be an instrument of lib-
eration, he recruited a new generation of lawyers who had been
brought up to think of the law as an instrument of oppression.
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