How did Thurgood Marshall become such an Incredible Lawyer?

recently joined Facebook like your grandmother. That's pretty great. Actually, I was thinking about that this week while reading up on Third Good Marshal, and it actually made me feel so bad for the Lincoln College class of nineteen thirty, which I know you're I think you're an expert on the Lincoln College class of nineteen thirty. I am not, but I'm guessing it's because they graduated a future Supreme

Court justice. Well, that's the thing. So Lincoln's class of nineteen thirty was actually home to a slew of prominent black leaders. So for literature you had Lengths and Hughes. For music, there was Cab Callaway. Then of course there was Marshall himself, who made this colossal name for himself in the legal system and on the political side of things. The class had Quamae Nachroma of the future president of Ghana.

Isn't that unbelievable? I mean, no matter which field the other students went into, they were all pretty much guaranteed to be outshone by the classmates. But the more I poked around Marshall's biography, the more I wanted to know. How did he become such a larger than life figure in the courtroom, how did he look at the Constitution? And did he really take the oath of office from an ex clan member? So let's dive in, say their

podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesh Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass watching old Days of Our Lives reruns. This is gives him an excuse to do this because I know he likes to do this on the quiet, but in honor of third good Marshall, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I know it's a tribute, but uh I I do feel like Tristin just loves his stories. He does,

he definitely loves his stories. Well that was my first thought, but Tristan was so adamant about only watching episodes from the nineteen seventies and eighties that it made me wonder if there really was a connection. So we did a little bit of digging, of course, and it turns out that during his years on the bench, Justice Third Good Marshall was actually a big fan of Days of Our Lives And I love this, but I mean, like really

a fan of soap operas in general. And apparently he once told Justice Brennan there was quote a lot to be learned about life from soap operas, so things like how to stop your evil twin from stealing the men you love. I imagine at these practical life lessons, and Justice Marshall didn't want to miss any of them. In fact, Time magazine ran this report this was back in nineteen seventies six, claiming that Marshall would often call a recess right around one pm so that he could watch the

latest Days of Our Lives episode in his chambers. You know, I guess they didn't have a way to uh TiVo or record things that I just say TiVo. Sometimes he would be late to his next meeting because he didn't want to miss the end of an episode, I totally said, TiVo. So obviously this is a funny thing to point out, because, you know, aside from his odd TV habit, which actually

makes him feel pretty human, like, his legacy is just stunning. Um. I mean you think about the pivolal role he had in the civil rights movement, his landmark appointment as the first black member of the Supreme Court. There's just a ton to discuss here. Yeah, there definitely is. All right, Well, I'll leave it up to you. Where where do you want to start? How about with a bombshell? You know

how I like to start these things. Apparently third Good Marshall's name wasn't actually third Good Marshal when he was born in Maryland. This was he was actually given the name thorough Good Marshal, like the word thorough good put together. But it was such a mouth well and so annoying, the spell that Marshall told this reporter. By the time I reached the second grade, I got tired of spelling all that out and had shortened it to third Good. I love that he had decided this by second grade,

and that's pretty amazing. All right. Well, I actually didn't know his name was abbreviated. But but what else did you dig up on his childhood? So he was born and raised in Baltimore, this is around the turn of the twentieth century. He had one older brother, this guy, William Aubrey Marshall. His mother was a school teacher, and his father, William Canfield Marshall, worked as a dining car waiter on a railroad and then later as this steward

at a fancy country club. So the Marshalls weren't exactly wealthy, but they felt middle class. And that's kind of amazing in itself when you consider that Thurgood's father was actually the grandson of a former slave, and this was not lost on Thurgood, like the social progress that was made in just a generation or two, and of course later he'd make it his mission to sort of push progress

even further. So I'm curious how did Thurgood get interested in the law in the first place, because I was looking a lot about his early legal career, but there really wasn't a lot of insight into what made him want to be a lawyer. So from everything I read, it was really his father who kind of sparked this passion. His dad William was this amateur writer, and he had also been interested in legal proceedings and how courts worked.

And it was such an obsession for him that in his free time he liked to go down to the local courthouse and listen to the civil and criminal trials. And sometimes he'd bring his sons along too. But this is the amazing part. Right when they got home, the three of them would actually lay out all the arguments they'd heard that day and then have these big, lively debates around the dinner table. And sometimes these discussions would

happen five times in a week. So in all this excitement, Thur A Good really started to develop this interest in law and how do you use words to confront injustice? In fact, we actually have their good words on this In he talked about his father's influence, saying, quote, he did it by teaching me to argue, by challenging my logic on every point, by making me prove every statement. He never told me to be a lawyer, but he turned me into one. You know, my son is big

into this series by John Grisham called Theodore Boone. Have your kids discovered this yet? So like, that's all I think about law now? Is like what kids are in the in the courtroom, like listening to these cases. But did you get a sense for like what kinds of cases the marshals were scrutinizing when they were at home. So Gaye pulled a ton of this for us, and and he couldn't track down specific cases, but it is easy to imagine that they would have seen a lot

of cases involving racial discrimination. When third Good was growing up in Baltimore, the city's death rate for African Americans was actually double that of white residence, and because of segregation, he and his brother were actually forced to attend this

all black public school. So he felt all of this at this really early age, and what he saw in both court and the classroom that really shaped the viewpoints he'd ultimately spend his life fighting for all right, So it was obviously engaged in a lot of self education, a really curious kid and observing all these trials, debating law with his dad. But I'm curious, how was he in school? Like? Was he was? He a pretty good student? I'm in grade wise, he was excellent in high school.

His grades were above average, and he made a name for himself on the debate team, you know, thanks to all this practice that he and his dad had had at home. But when it came to behavior, third Good was actually kind of a troublemaker. Yeah, you might even say he no, no, no, do not say they're bad. I could tell I knew that's where you were going

with that. Yeah, that's probably for the best. But he actually misbehaved a lot at school, and whenever you did, his teachers would make him read the Constitution as punishment. And here's the thing. They're Good gotten so much trouble that by the time he graduated, which was a year early, he had memorized the entire Constitution. Uh, you know, it's it's it's funny. They didn't realize how much they were contributing to his, you know, excellence in this in this field.

And listening to you lay all this out, I mean, it's pretty amazing how all these different little things in his life seemed to be working together to sort of nudge him along a certain path. And I mean, I know we're looking at all this in hindsight and speaking in these broad terms, but his family history, his city, his school, his dad's interests of course, and now even his punishments contributed to this, but you know, when you take it all together, it almost seems inevitable that he

would become a lawyer and fight for civil rights. Yeah, and I guess They're Good, agreed with you, Because after graduating college in ninety he immediately applied to the University of Maryland law school. And this is actually where one of those nudges down the path comes in, because despite a glowing high school transcript, the college ultimately rejected They're

Good because of the color of his skin. But even though this is jumping a little bit ahead, I want to give you some instant satisfaction by telling you that about five years after he applied, They're Good actually helped launch and win the case that brought an end to segregation at the very school that rejected him. It's pretty sweet vindication. That's that's pretty great and I can only imagine how good it must have felt when that verdict came in. And I'm curious that, like, where did Marshall

wind up studying law? So instead of Maryland, Marshall went to law school at Howard University, which is obviously historically black, so segregation wasn't an issue, and at the time the dean of the law school was this super well respected civil rights lawyer named Charles Houston, and on campus, Houston had this reputation for being super strict and demanding, but Marshall actually responded well to the style of teaching, and in fact, the two hit it off so well that

Houston became a mentor to Marshall, and years later they worked closely together in legal division of the a CP. Yeah, Marshall's work with the a CP became the cornerstone of his career, so I definitely say he chose the right mentor in Houston. So when did Marshall first get involved with the a CP. Was Was that straight out of law school? No? So, Marshall actually passed the bar exam and graduated from Howard with honors. But he spent his first few post grad years trying to get this private

practice going in Baltimore. He landed a few small cases every now and then, but none of them paid very much, and things got so bad that Thirdgood was forced to take a second job at an STD clinic just to make rent. In fact, if you remember breakthrough case I mentioned earlier, the one where Third Goood got the University of Maryland to desegregate. He was working the late shift at that clinic the whole time he prepped for the case.

And even when he moved to New York City in nineteen thirty six to work full time for the ub A CP, Third Good was so concerned that things wouldn't pan out as a lawyer that he didn't actually quit his job at the clinic. He he just requested a six month leave of absence. That's how touch and go things were for him as a young lawyer. That is pretty wild. You mentioned Marshall's mentor was involved with the Double A CP. Did did he actually have something to

do with Marshall getting called up to New York? So, Charles Houston had actually resigned as dean in nineteen thirty five so that he could become the first legal counsel for the Double A CP, and by the time Marshall joined on a year later, Houston had already become the director of the group's legal division and the two worked side by side on civil rights cases for the next few years. And then when Houston retired from the role in nineteen forty, third Good stepped in and he really

didn't miss a beat. He stayed on as director all throughout the forties and the fifties. Yeah, that's probably the portion of his career that I feel most familiar with, you know, all the landmark cases he tackled, and you know, not just as a justice serving on the Supreme Court, but as a lawyer arguing in front of the Supreme Court, which is perfect because I'll hand you the baton and you can walk us through it. But let's take a

quick break first. You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about how third Good Marshall earned his seat on the highest court in the country. And I feel like you were maybe alluding to this answer just before the break. You were saying that it was Marshall's time with the double A CP that really won him his acclaim. Yeah,

it's definitely true. I mean, Marshall served as the group's top attorney for a little over two decades, and this was when he really made a name for himself because during that period he argued a record setting thirty two cases before the Supreme Court. And get this, so, out of those thirty two civil rights cases, Marshal won twenty nine of those, not a bad average at all, even today, all these decades later, Marshall is still near the top of the list for the number of cases argued and

one before the Supreme Court. I mean, that's stunning. But what were some of his biggest wins. Well, his first Supreme Court victory was a pretty big one. So this was a ninety case. It's called Chambers versus Florida, and it dealt with these four black men who had confessed to a murder earlier that year and had been sentenced to death for it. However, Marshall was able to show that their confessions to the crime had been coerced by

the police. So the four suspects had been held in police custody for a full week, never given access to legal counsel, and despite this, the men had been questioned individually throughout the week, with as many as ten police officers and community members present during these interrogations, but again no lawyers were present, and because this was all prior to the establishment of Miranda rights, no one told the men that they had the right to remain silent during

these interrogations. So in the end, the court ruled that the confessions that had led to a conviction had not been given voluntarily, which made them inadmissible, so the death

sentence ruling was actually overturned. I mean, it is wild to think that there was a time when those kinds of tactics were actually the norm, you know, holding people without charges, denying them counsel, and of course, you know, these civil rights violations still happened, but in the era we're talking about, it sounds like it was more or

less acceptable behavior until cases like this were brought to trial. Yeah, it would actually be another twenty six years after the Chambers case before those tactics would finally be outlawed by the court, and that's when police actually had to start telling suspects that they had the right to an attorney

and the right to remain silent and all that. Yep, that was the ruling in the Miranda versus Arizona case of nineteen sixty six, which by the way, was also a case that Marshall argued, though he was the Solicitor General by that point and no longer working for the Double A. CP and Marshall had a slew of other landmark victories in the years between Chambers and Miranda, but the biggest had to be Brown versus the Board of Education, the case that brought down school segregation and the whole

separate but equal doctrine. So there's no question that was one of the most important cases of the twentieth century and probably the most defining moment of Marshall's whole career. And this was in the early fifties, right, Yes, was nineteen fifty four, so this was really before the civil

rights movement had gotten into full swing. It was a year before Rosa Parks bus ride, three years before the Civil Rights Act of nineteen fifty seven, and so the Brown Case was kind of a precursor to all of that, And it may have taken a while for the positive ruling to be fully enforced, but right from the outset, it definitely helped kick off the movement and kind of

paved the way for more civil rights victories to come. So, I know the main takeaways from the Brown case have been covered pretty well by now, but could you maybe run through the basics just for certainly for me, but for anyone else who might have forgotten. Sure. So, basically, Marshall was representing a group of black parents whose children had been forced to attend all black schools, and this

was in Topeka, Kansas, you might remember. And of course this was a case that was near Marshall's heart because this was something he had experienced himself, first in high school and then of course again in college. So in the end, Marshall argued that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court agreed with

him unanimously. Actually, So to be clear that positive ruling was never guaranteed given the political climate of the era, particularly in the South, you know, where Jim Crow laws were still very much in effect, but it helped that Marshall was so forceful and so clear when exposing the

hypocrisies of the current laws in court. So, for example, there was one point during the Brown arguments when the Attorney General of Virginia complained that bringing the case before the Court was an assault by the double A C P on the quote cherished heritage of segregation. Yeah, and it gets even worse when you hear how the Attorney General phrased all this. He said that the d A CP was trying to quote, pressed this crown of thorns upon our brow and hold the hemlock to our lips.

It's just so bizarre, which I guess is a dual reference, likening the fall of segregation to both the crucifixion of Christ and the death of Socrates. I'm not, I'm not, but just like you said it, it's definitely messy and weird. Yeah, and you know you'll actually like Marshall's response to this. So he told the court, you have heard references to one state's greatest and most cherished heritage, and when you look for it, you find that greatest and most cherished

heritage is to segregate colored people. I mean, it's just stuinny to me that they voted unanimously right with him. It's crazy. But I I do want to go back to something you mentioned a little earlier. You said Marshall became the Solicitor General in the sixties, Right, So, Marshall actually received a couple of presidential appointments before finally being called up to the Supreme Court. He left the end of a CP in the early sixties, and this was to serve on the U s Court of Appeals, And

that was after being nominated by President Kennedy. And then four years later Kennedy's successor, Linda Johnson, he appointed Marshall the first black solicitor general in US history, which is obviously important historically, but I feel like I'd appreciate it a little bit more if I actually knew what a solicitor general did? You know? You don't think about this

every day. That's fair. Well, so, the solicitor General is, as you might expect, a legal post, and it's basically the attorney who goes before the Supreme Court to argue cases on behalf of the federal government. So a lot like what he had done for twenty years with the double A CP, but now with the federal government as his client, so I get what he does now. Was he still sticking to arguing civil rights cases once he started working for the government or did that all change? No,

he definitely was. And it was during this time on the Court of Appeals that Marshall issued over one hundred decisions on civil rights battles as well as other hot button issues like women's rights, police brutality, and amazingly, none of these hundred plus decisions were overturned by the Supreme Court, and Marshall had a similarly strong record during his two years as Solicitor General too. So he argued nineteen cases before the Supreme Court during that stint, and one fourteen

of those. That is really impressive. Yeah, it's true. And with a track record like that, it wasn't long before President Johnson decided that Marshall belonged on the Supreme Court. So there were a couple of wrenches in his plan, though, and the chief among them was that there wasn't actually

a vacancy to appoint him to. So I'm guessing Johnson might have played a little dirty and engineered something for him, right, Some say that he did, Yeah, I mean, the story goes that Johnson decided to engineer a vacancy himself by creating a conflict of interest for one of the sitting justices, and this was a fellow Democrat named Tom Clark. So apparently President Johnson appointed Clark's son as Attorney General, which prompted his father to step down, so it wouldn't look

like nepotism. So it's up for debate whether this was done to open the seat to Marshall specifically, but he is definitely the one who filled it, and there is evidence that Johnson and Marshall liked each other and got along pretty well. So according biographer Juan Williams the two men love to drink bourbon and tell stories full of lies and watch soapar Rose. Maybe so, But even with Johnson on his side, it's not like Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court was a cake wall. I can't imagine.

There was a backlash to trying to get a black person on the Supreme Court. Pretty shocking, I know. But all right, well, let's take a quick break and then get back into this. Okay, Well, so third good. Marshall was sworn into the Supreme Court in October of nineteen seven, but that was only after what it sounds like was

this pretty grueling confirmation process. It took place over the course of a week that summer, and from what I read, Marshall underwent more hours of questioning than any Supreme Court nominee before him. Yeah, this was largely because a handful of senators from Southern States really had their best to torpedo his nomination. To the history of the region has left many of these old guard senators with, you know, an axe to grind and shutting down. The first potential

black Scotus member definitely fit the bill. So, for instance, Mississippi senator at the time was a guy named James Eastland, and according to The Atlantic, Eastland was quote a notorious racist whose father had famously lynched black people. He himself owned a plantation that employed more than one hundred black sharecroppers, and his daughter had been crowned miss Confederacy nineteen six. That's a little clue there. Anyway, he was the head

of the committee for Marshall's nomination. It's like a little uphill battle. Yeah. I mean, you read a LinkedIn profile like that and it feels like a miracle that that Marshall got through, right. I Mean, he wasn't the only one there with you know, you might consider questionable views on race. So Senators from Thurman was also on the committee. It's amazing how long this guy is in office. And his main contribution was to subject Marshal to what basically

amounted to a Jim Crow or a literacy test. He crossed examined Marshall, quizzing him on all these obscure, ridiculously specific portions of political history. So, for instance, one question he asked him was to name all the members of the Congressional committee that had reviewed the fourteenth amendment in eighteen sixties six. Of course he couldn't answer this. But there's one thing nobody could a little later in the preceding Ted Kennedy Astrom tournament, if he could name the

committee members from eighteen sixty six and guess what. No, of course he couldn't, and there was no reason why Supreme Court justice would need to rattle off random information like that. So these Southern senators were drilling Marshall because of the color of his skin and because of what he represented, not because they had any real serious doubts about his legal knowledge or his ability to serve in this position, and because the case against Marshall was so flimsy.

The Judiciary Committee ultimately approved his nomination with a resounding eleven to five vote, and then the Senate confirmed him with an equally definitive vote of six nine to eleven, which honestly is a little surprising when you look back. Yeah, I mean, that's impressive, but it does feel like there are a significant amount of Senators who didn't vote on it, right, Like, that's only like eighty people who voted on his nominations.

Quick math. Well, in the ind President Johnson knew he could never get the votes of the Southern Democratic senators who opposed Marshall, so rather than trying to sway the unswayable, he instead focused on getting them to abstain from voting altogether, rather than casting a vote against Marshall. And the lobbying seemed to work, as you can tell from these numbers.

But I do think it's worth noting that even if all twenty of those substentions had voted no on Marshall, he still would have had more than enough yes is to get confirmed. Yeah, and after the harassment and committee, it must have been nice to have that kind of validation, right, Like, that's a pretty resounding vote in Marshall's favor. Oh, definitely. I mean, the hearing had been this speed bump and one ended up being a pretty smooth next few years

for Marshall. He joined a very liberal Supreme Court, which obviously lined up very well with Marshall's own political views. So I am curious about this, Like, what would you say those views were? Broadly speaking? Like, his job was obviously to interpret the Constitution, so what was his take

on it? I mean, it's hard to say definitively, but from what I've read, about his rulings and from people who worked closely with him, it sounds like Marshall largely viewed the Constitution as a means of promoting a kind of equality under the law, especially following the Civil War

and the addition of certain amendments. And I think that viewpoint is certainly reflected in the changes to the constitutional law that he had advocated for during all his years as both an attorney and then later as a judge. And he was trying to make the law align more closely with the goal of legal equality under the law that he saw represented in the Constitution. And actually, I have a quote here that's a good example of the

kind of alignment I'm talking about. This is something Marshall said in which is just a few years before his retirement in ninety one. He said, quote, a child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi has exactly the same rights as a white bay be born the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it's not a goal worth working for, which is obviously like a powerful way to think about it. And it's interesting to think about

how people interpret Marshall's philosophy. It's kind of this, uh, do what you think is right and let the law catch up idea. And on one hand that puts them in the category of activist judges, which some politicians kind of rail against today, And on the other hand it sort of lets the laws guide the country to a

more equitable world. But I was thinking a lot about this week how Marshall played a pretty unique role in the civil rights movement in that regard, like you think about Martin Luther King Jr. And Malcolm X, and how they sort of shared the spotlight when people think about the most influential figures of that era, and they each tried their own different courses of action, right Like King was more of this I have a dream, big unity, big movement, and Malcolm was more by any means necessary.

But in the background you've got through Marshall plugging away with the third Course of Act and not to change society directly, but but to actually change the laws that dictate the kind of society we live in. He actually came across an obituary from Marshall that um that said, we make movies about Malcolm X. We get a holiday

to honor Dr Martin Luther King. But every day we live the legacy of justice third good Marshal, Which isn't to say that we don't live the legacy of the other guys too, But legal precedent can sometimes hold more sway in the long term than a speech or a march. So I do think we owe a special kind of debt to Marshall for you know, sort of covering the bases on that end. So why do you think Marshall doesn't seem to get as much attention these days as

other civil rights icons. Is it just that like courtroom dramas are seen as kind of stuffy or dance or academic compared to like speeches and protests. Yeah, I mean, you know, I actually think a lot of it comes down to how Marshall's career went in the years after he joined the Supreme Court. We mentioned there had been a liberal majority when Marshall was confirmed in the late nineteen sixties, but that changed drastically over the course of

the seventies and then into the eighties. If during Marshall's twenty four years on the court, Republican presidents made eight consecutive appointments, was transformed the court and filled every spot on the bench but his So that means then in the second half of his tenure, Marshall was in the minority and found you know, his opinions increasingly overruled. As you might imagine that, there wasn't an easy transition for somebody whose entire career was built on his incredible pensiant

for winning. Marshall became more and more isolated from the rest of the court. You know, his contributions mostly limited to these strongly worded descents about his colleagues rulings. But he never gave up. Actually, at one point even vowed to remain on the court until he was a hundred and ten years old. But in the end he became too ill to continue serving and had to step down in n So two years later, Marshall passed away at

the age of eighty four. Well, it's fascinating to hear how Marshall got styming like that after finally making it to the Supreme Court. But I know, his presence on the court alone still had this like profound impact on the country and and certainly on the issues he spent his whole life fighting for. And I'm sure just having a black man seated on the highest court in the land had to be life changing for millions of people and something that must have influenced so many kids and

what they dreamed was possible. You know, I think even if you don't have that personal connection with his service, there's still so much to admire about Marshall's legacy. So his commitment to changing the system from within, and you know, being a voice for the voiceless is something that should still resonate with all of us. In fact, this is gonna sound random, but did you happen to come across

the commencement address that he gave at the University of Virginia. No, I haven't read that, all right, Well, he gave it to the graduating class of ninety eight, and it is worth tracking down. I won't read all of it here, but there's this one piece of advice that really stuck out to me, and it just says, where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out because this is your country, this is your democracy, make it, protect it,

pass it on. I like that. So what do you say we leave things there and jump straight into the fact off. All right, Well, here's something kind of grando. Remember how I mentioned that third good. Marshall graduated college with the first president of Ghana earlier. So well, it turns out that wasn't the only connection Marshall had with

the emerging nation. In the nineteen fifties, after Marshall made a name for himself with the a c P, the United Nations and the United Kingdom asked him to help write the constitutions of Ghana and Tanzi, which he of course did and in fact, both of those constitutions are still in use today. That is wild. But you know what made the UN and in the UK think to

ask Marshal for help. Well, at the time, the regions had just won their independence from European rules, so there was some international concern about the minority white citizens of the new countries and the fact that they might face oppression. And so the U N and the UK figured that since Marshall had been such an effective champion for minority rights in America, he actually might be able to do the same for God in Tanzania. That's really interesting. So

here's what I was pretty shocked to learn. Not only was Thurgood Marshall sworn into the Supreme Court by a former klansman, it actually happened by Marshall's request. So apparently Marshall saw it as a way to kind of extend in Olive branch to the South and to the Southern senators who had opposed his nomination. And weirdly enough, the one time Alabama Clan member was this guy named Hugo. Black. He was also a Justice of the Supreme Court when

Marshall was appointed in nineteen sixty seven. So Black had been appointed to the Court back in ninety seven, and it was just a few weeks into his term that his prior involvement with the clan came to light. So dozens of newspapers called for his resignation, but Black stayed on on the court anyway, sitting the fact that he had already cut ties with the clan I guess more than a decade earlier, and that he had no intention

of ever joining up again. So do you think Black ever really turned over a new leaf or was he just distancing himself from the clan, you know, for political reasons. It is tough to say for certain either way, but the truth is probably somewhere in between. If you look at Black's track record on the court, it certainly seems

like he changed his mind. He was part of that unanimous ruling that struck down school segregation, and he and Marshall actually became pretty chummy while serving together until Black's retirement in nineteen seventy one. Of course, anyway you look at it, a former klansman swearing in the first black Supreme Court justice does say a lot about the changing shape of race relations in America at the time, and it was this really powerful message to send, and Marshall

didn't let that opportunity go to waste. Or One thing I don't think we've mentioned yet is the nickname Marshall earned for himself during his time working for the Double A c P. He was known colloquially as Mr. Civil Rights. Really creative though, and his dedication to the cause certainly made him deserving of this title. In fact, Marshall often put his own life on the line while fighting for these civil rights, and it was in nineteen forty six that he went to Tennessee to defend a group of

black men and a pretty racially charged case. Once the trial over, Marshall and his colleagues knew it was in their best entriest to get out of town as fast as possible. Unfortunately, their concern was quickly validated because, according to biographer Will hay Good, Marshall's group was ambushed on the road by locals and Marshall himself was arrested on

these false charges. Separate from this group. Marshall was then placed in a black sheriff's car immediately driven off the main road, which, given the circumstances, was pretty omous, and to make the whole thing even more suspicious, Marshall's colleagues were instructed not to follow and instead to continue driving on their way to Nashville. Luckily, the group knew better. They decided to tail the sheriff anyway, and at that point the car quickly returned to the main road and

Marshall was released not long afterwards. So when recounting the event years later, Marshall said he would have been lynched then and there if not for his colleagues, So that is horrifying. Here's one that's a little later. According to Marshall's second wife, he was a super talented home cook, and he would often come home in the evenings after a long day in the Supreme Court and then just whip up these amazing meals for his wife and two sons,

using every single pot in the kitchen. Apparently his specialty dish was chicken and Chitland's. I kind of want this a third good Marshall cook book, all right. Speaking of Marshall's second wife, I've actually got a sweet one here about her. She was a woman of Philippine descent. Her name was Cecilia Suyot, and the way she and Marshall

met was a bit of a happy accident. Cecilia went to the unemployment office in ninety eight she was looking for work, and because her skin was on the darker side, the clerk assumed she was black and set her up with a job as a stenographer for then double A CPS legal team. Cecilia later said she was forever grateful for the clerk's mistaken assumption, because not only did it open her eyes to the race problem of America, it

also introduced her to her future husband. At first, though, Cecilia wasn't sure she and Marshall would make a good match, or at least not a publicly accepted one. Although she had been born in Hawaii, she worried that people would think Marshall was marrying a foreigner. And then it would have had a negative impact on his budding career. But Marshall didn't want any of that. When Cecilia raised this concern, Marshall told her plainly, I don't care what people think.

I'm marrying you. And he did. But Marshall and Cecilia tied the knot in nineteen had two sons together, John and Third Good Jr. And remained happily married until Marshall's passing in nine oh and I'm happy to report Cecilia herself is still going strong today at ninety years young. I love that, such a great story, and I do think you deserved today's trophy for it. That does it for today's show. If you want to send us facts or just say hello, where a part Time Genius at

I heart media dot com. So from Gabe, Tristan Will and me, thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H