Posted Saturday morning, October 17, 2020.
“Never a dull or lazy moment”: Chadwick Boseman as the 32 year old Thurgood Marshall in 1940, long before he became a justice on the Supreme Court, when he was a lawyer for the NAACP, looking as if he’s almost enjoying the harassment of a crowd of white racists outside the courthouse where he’s defending a black man on trial for raping a white woman in a scene from the 2017 movie “Marshall”.
I love it that Thurgood Marshall’s secretary Alice Stovall called the Westerns her boss enjoyed “they-went-that-a-way movies”. I wish she’d been a character in the movie “Marshall”. I wish the movie had shown Marshal going to a movie with a singing cowboy star. I wish I’d been able to find a photo of the real 32 year-old Thurgood Marshall to go with this quote from Will Haygood’s book “Showdown”:’’
Marshall began doing legal work for the NAACP. Charlie Houston [the first president of Howard Law School and Marshall’s mentor] kept a close eye on his onetime star pupil. “There’s never a dull or lazy moment, except when I have to travel with him,” Alice Stovall, another one of Marshall’s earliest secretaries, would come to recall. “Then I’m always left on the train while he spends his time in the dining car, gossipping with the crew...If we have a layover, changing trains, I sit by myself in the station, by preference, while he goes off to see one of those they-went-that-a-way pictures; anyone will do, even singing cowboys.”
---from “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America” by Wil Haygood.
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