CRUSADERS IN THE COURT, EXCERPT

CRUSADERS IN THE COURTS: Legal Battles in the Civil Rights Movement, by Jack Greenberg (Twelve Tables Press, NY: 2004), p. 393 “When Thurgood was sitting on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, he would sometimes come up to Columbus Circle for lunch. Jim Nabrit, Thurgood and I would go to Whyte's on Fifty-seventh Street for seafood and then back to the office, where Thurgood would sit on a table in the library and regale the staff with war stories. Sometimes I would go downtown to see him at the Courthouse at Foley Square, where the Second Circuit sat. We would shoot the breeze and then go out to lunch. On one such visit in July 1965, he told me that Lyndon Johnson had called him and asked if he would leave the court of appeals to become Solicitor General. This posed a problem for someone with a family. He would be giving up life tenure on the court of appeals and taking a substantial cut in pay. But, the president had added, 'This won't be the end of the road.' The president wasn't promising anything, but still... “Thurgood accepted Johnson's offer. The Solicitor General's job was to represent the government in the Supreme Court, and when we had LDF cases, we sometimes saw Thurgood argue cases in traditional morning coat and striped trousers. The cases were usually of a conventional, non-civil rights variety, which could not be invested with the feeling and familiarity with which he had used to argue our cases. He presented them in a more business-like manner. President Johnson was true to his word—it wasn't the end of the road. In 1967, Johnson nominated Thurgood to the Supreme Court, where, after a bruising confirmation process, in which white racism once more reared its ugly head, he began sitting that fall, the first black Supreme Court justice.”