(Thread) We Can All Be Social Engineers

A thread for Juneteenth.

Information from Book 6 in my Making of America series⤵️

Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His interest in law, and his awareness of racial injustice, was awakened early.
1/ He later talked about a high school classroom window that faced the local police station.

He listened as the all-white police force questioned suspects, who were mostly African American:
2/ After college, Marshall wanted to go to the University of Maryland Law School but was denied admission because of his race.

So he enrolled at Howard University. Charles Houston had just taken over as dean.
3/ Burning inside Houston was pent-up rage at Jim Crow and the injustices suffered by African Americans. He trained his students to become social engineers ⤵️

Marshall graduated at the top of his law school class and became a civil rights lawyer—a social engineer.
4/ Marshall took on racial segregation and police brutality.

He successfully sued the University of Maryland, and forced them to admit black students. (He enjoyed that one).

One of his most harrowing experiences was an encounter with Tennessee police in 1946.
5/ He’d been summoned to Tennessee defend 25 African-Americans who had been wrongly charged with assault and attempted murder.

He and a team of lawyers got the charges dropped for two of the defendants, and secured not guilty verdicts for 21 others.
6/ The two remaining defendants were entitled to a new trial because of errors. It was a resounding victory.

The local police were enraged by the verdicts. Marshall and team knew their lives were in danger.

He and his team left town the moment the court adjourned.
7/ The lawyers were out of the town on the open highway, on their way to Nashville, when they realized they were being followed by a patrol car.

The police stopped them three times.
8/ The third time, Marshall was riding in the back seat. The police arrested him for drunk “driving.” They put him in the patrol car and headed back toward the town (Columbia).

Then the patrol car careened off the road toward a river.

Marshall was sure they would kill him.
9/ His pals, the other lawyers, though, were following right behind the police car.

So the patrol car turned back to town and took Marshall to the magistrate.

“He doesn’t look drunk to me,” said the magistrate.
10/ The Magistrate determined that Marshall wasn’t drunk and let him go. He met up with his buddies.

A group of locals figured out how to smuggle the lawyers safely out of town.

Then there was the time the Dallas chief of police learned Marshall was coming to town:
11/ Marshall is best known for being the "social engineer" behind Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that ended racial segregation in America and sparked the modern Civil Rights movement.

Marshall, jubilant with his success, was unprepared for the backlash.
12/ In August of 1957 Marshall was called to Little Rock for an emergency. Violence was about to erupt.

The reason? Nine African American students planned to enroll in the all-white Central High School.
13/ The Governor of Arkansas, Orval Eugene Faubus, said if any African American children tried to enter the school, “blood would run in the street.”

Angry white mobs gathered in front of the school.

But the African American youngsters were determined.
14/ On the first day of class, when the first black student arrived, a mob surrounded her and shouted “Lynch her, lynch her.”

She was saved by a white woman who shielded her until she could run away from the school for safety.

Journalists filmed the jeering crowds.
15/ In 1968, LBJ appointed Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice.

Marshall lived long enough to watch as the backlash gathered momentum.

He watched as an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court unraveled much of his life’s work.
16/ I used to think the arc of history looked like this ⤵️

I imagined US history as an arc bending toward greater justice as more people came to be included in “we the people.”

Now I understand that other people see American history in a completely different way.
17/ Another group, who we might call reactionaries, look back longingly to our nation's founding, when, in their view, things were better.

And what were things like? Privileged white men had almost complete personal liberty. The frontier was a place white men could grab land.
18/ Before modern rape and sexual harassment laws, they could grab women.

Before federal agencies and regulations, they could manipulate markets.

They look back longingly to a time when America was "great."

They see American history like this:
19/ Now I understand that each bit of progress brings an angry backlash.

I understand that people who love hierarchy and want to return to a bygone era will always be with us.

We push forward, and they push backward.

The graph looks like this:
20/ We create rules for fairness.
They hate the rules, and break them.

We strive for equality.
They want hierarchy.

It never ends, unless we all give up.

In memory of Thurgood Marshall, we must all be social engineers. We can never stop pushing forward.
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