“Marshall” Live Hard. Fight Harder. Review…
The Not Old Better Show, Movies for Adults
October 2, 2017 is the 50th anniversary of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s swearing-in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on October 2, 1967. He was the Court’s 96th justice and the first African American to hold a seat on the Supreme Court.
Justice Marshall had a monumentally successful career arguing before the Supreme Court. As President Johnson noted, “Marshall is already in the front ranks of the great lawyers of this generation. He has argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court; he has won 29 of them. And that is a batting average of .900.” As a matter of fact, and many in our Not Old Better audience will recall, President Lyndon Johnson announced Marshall‘s nomination to the Court on June 13, 1967, the day after the Court in Loving v. Virginia , struck down Virginia‘s anti — miscegenation law, the last major vestige of the racial apartheid era. We reviewed the moving, “Loving” last year, which many of you commented on and enjoyed. So, parallels in time space here with “Marshall.” This film takes place before Thurgood Marshall began serving on the Supreme Court, when Marshall served as “go to” trial lawyer for the NAACP.
If you have to see one motion picture this weekend or place a film on your must-see list of fall films, I wholeheartedly recommend Marshall. As the title suggests, the movie is about Thurgood Marshall, the iconic civil rights attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who used the courtroom to break racial barriers and help decimate institutionalized Jim Crow when he won the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared state laws that established segregation in schools to be unconstitutional. It is fitting that the movie is being released on the 50th anniversary of Marshall being named the first black Supreme Court justice.
