What would late civil rights icon and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall say about the current court?

"Last week, my heart sank as I listened to the Supreme Court's oral arguments over yet another attempt to gut what's left of the Voting Rights Act. It was a law designed to protect the electoral power of Black Americans against the forces of white supremacy masquerading as states' rights. As the conservative justices twisted themselves into rhetorical knots to justify dismantling this cornerstone of democracy, I couldn't help but think that the late civil rights icon and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall warned us this day would come by unintentionally prophesizing, "Liberty cannot bloom amid hate.""

"In the late '80s or early '90s, I was walking home one evening from my job on Capitol Hill, past the Library of Congress, when out stepped Justice Thurgood Marshall. He was a giant in every sense of the word. I walked right up, shook his hand, and said hello. What I remember most vividly wasn't what he said, but the sheer presence of him. He was tall, commanding, and somehow both warm and formidable."

"Years later, after his death in 1993, I bought books about him since he had crossed my path and I wanted to know more about him. It was Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 and then the follow-up, Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991. The author of the books was Mark Tushnet, now the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, who once clerked for Justice Marshall."

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments that could further weaken the Voting Rights Act, risking erosion of protections for Black voters against discriminatory state actions. Conservative justices employed rhetorical strategies aimed at dismantling long-standing voting safeguards. The narrator recounts a memorable encounter with Justice Thurgood Marshall in the late 1980s or early 1990s, describing his imposing, warm, and formidable presence. Subsequent reading of Mark Tushnet's two-volume works on Marshall deepened that understanding. Mark Tushnet, a former Marshall clerk and Harvard Law professor, remembered Marshall as larger than life and reflected on his own youthful perspective during the clerkship.

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