By The Editors

Early in “Thurgood,” the one-man play about Thurgood Marshall starring Laurence Fishburne now at Washington’s famed John F. Kennedy Center, Marshall recalls that during one of his first nights as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania’s historically black Lincoln University, he and several friends had a minor encounter in the nearby town with the kind of petty racism that was pervasive everywhere in America.

Although no harm came to them, Marshall, reminiscing about his life before an imaginary class at his alma mater, Howard University Law School, recalls that later that night, “I couldn’t sleep. I lay there thinking, am I going to go through life being humiliated because of the color of my skin?”

It is one of the many quietly powerful moments in this dramatization of the life of a man who helped show America what democracy means.

In one sense, Thurgood Marshall’s is a quintessential American story – a tale of the triumph of goodness as alluring as the tales of poor boys who made good spun by the 19th-century novelist Horatio Alger. Born into a hard-working, poor family, Marshall rose by dint of native intelligence, determination, hard work, and good fortune to—as a revered Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court—one of the pinnacles of American society.

But, unlike Alger’s fictional heroes, Thurgood Marshall was born a black American. He was born one hundred and two years ago into an American society which had repudiated the moral victory of abolitionism and the emancipation of the slaves and once again decreed by law and by custom which had the force of law that black Americans had no rights white Americans need respect.

The legal foundation of that cruel world was the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v Ferguson. Homer Adolph Plessy was a member of the New Orleans gens du couleur caste who in 1892 had challenged the Louisiana laws requiring racial segregation on public transportation in the state. The Court’s 7 to 1 ruling validated the burgeoning racist laws in the South that had already ensnared blacks in a vast web of discrimination and often unspeakable violence. Within a few years, the edifice of Jim Crow was complete. Black Americans had entered what the historian Rayford Logan called “the Nadir” of their existence. Yet, the cruelty of the American society of those years was the making of Thurgood Marshall. White America had sought to cow him, as it did every black American. Instead, the injustice he witnessed and endured ultimately inspired him.

“If you want to understand my story,” says Marshall, “remember that name—Homer Adolph Plessy.”

Marshall would spend the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s involved in and then leading the brilliantly-devised, patient, courageous—and patriotic—effort of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and ordinary citizens to rid America of the virus of Jim Crow and redeem the honor of Homer Plessy and the millions of black Americans who had suffered under it.

“Thurgood” convincingly conveys the drama, poignancy and majesty of that saga and Marshall’s personal life. Although many specific individuals and events necessarily go unmentioned during the play’s ninety-minute span, it nonetheless has a sense of completeness. The dialogue covers much historical ground by implication, even as it focuses on a particular event, development or circumstance. Fishburne’s performance, of course, is crucial. He’s captured not only the timbre and cadence of Marshall’s voice but the breadth of his personality as well. Fishburne’s Thurgood is more than the superb legal tactician and civil rights warrior. He is also a highly social being—witty, well acquainted with and willing to use profanity and enjoy a drink now and then, a raconteur who also loves hearing a good story, and is unafraid to poke fun at himself.

Those qualities enhance Fishburne’s portrayal of what Thurgood Marshall represented: black Americans’ unshakable resolve to grasp the full measure of their American citizenship and live life to the fullest while doing it.

They would need every ounce of that resolve down through the decades. Their patience and determination would be tested again and again by brazen acts of violence, by legislative and judicial setbacks, and, perhaps most of all, by the indifference of the majority of white Americans. The subsequent triumph of the Civil Rights Movement has cast a pleasing aura of inevitability about the struggle of those years. In reality, when Thurgood Marshall graduated from Howard Law School in 1933, the odds seemed completely stacked against success. But Marshall and his fellow black Americans had the constant goad, the endlessly repeating provocation of living in Jim Crow America.

As a Lincoln University freshman, Thurgood Marshall had asked himself, “am I going to go through life being humiliated because of the color of my skin?” That was the fundamental question black Americans had to ask themselves and answer—and keep asking themselves and answering — in the majority of the decades of Thurgood Marshall’s life. Black America and America are profoundly fortunate that as a young man Thurgood Marshall chose to answer that question in the negative.