Discussion of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas's fitness for the job has centered on his pronounced lack of agreement with the agenda to which Thurgood Marshall gave his life's work. That's unsurprising, given Justice Marshall's historic role in American race relations. Add in the continuing outrage over Ronald Reagan's eight-year attack on civil rights and the failure of George Bush to shift course away from that attack and disquiet becomes still more understandable.
But Clarence Thomas is mostly irrelevant. Before he announced his retirement, William Rehnquist's court had come down 6-3 against Justice Marshall on nearly every issue he cared about.
Evening Sun editorial page editor Ray Jenkins has written that George Wallace succeeded through the presidencies of Messrs. Reagan and Bush, and he is right.
The Reagan Revolution also ushered in the "me first" years. A political philosophy that was anti-government, anti-taxes, anti-social services seemed to so many to be healthy when an Arthur Laffer could show on graphs that lower taxes really would mean more for everyone. "Morning in America" would provide -- through good old economic opportunity -- what the whole junkpile of Great Society programs had not. Why didn't blacks, Hispanics and other minorities give up their tired old rhetoric and give it a try?
Thus, we see a black man described as a "conservative" nominated to the Supreme Court, with "conservative" politicians looking on and laughing, as "liberals," supported by their black colleagues and friends, struggle to block his path.
What's really needed here is a top-to-bottom reassessment of strategies for the people who want to open all the doors. Thurgood Marshall's own life story provides ground for optimism, despite his later frustrations.
The 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision put the underpinning in to support legal segregation of the races in the South, and that is the world into which Thurgood Marshall was born. By 1915, however, attorneys representing the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had begun attacks of their own. After two decades of trying, some progress had been made but many cases were being lost.
