Remembering The Crazy Racism Of The Legal Profession In The Jim Crow Era

Happy anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education!

New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. cph 3c27042)

The indignities faced by Black lawyers practicing in southern courts in the decades before Brown were both big and small. In the middle of the 20th century, Thurgood Marshall and the lawyers bringing incredibly consequential civil rights cases could not even eat in the cafeteria in many of the federal courthouses where they brilliantly argued. Famished at the end of the first day of trial in his ultimately successful 1947 challenge to the exclusion of Black applicants from the University of Oklahoma Law School, Marshall told his client, Ada Sipuel, “tomorrow I’ll try the case, and you bring the bologna sandwiches.”

— Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., writing for Big Law Business to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. At a time when Trump judicial nominees can’t bring themselves to defend the 9-0 decision, Ifill makes a powerful case on the importance of the seminal decision.

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