Thurgood Marshall Memo "Saving the Race"

Author: Thurgood Marshall
Place and Time:November 17, 1941, NAACP Headquarters
Prior Knowledge: Before his nomination to the Court, Thurgood Marshall was the executive director and counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Audience: Members of the NAACP's Legal Department
Reason: In this 1941 memo to the NAACP legal staff, Marshall discusses a voting rights case in Texas.
The Main Idea: He wanted to find a case that would help end segregation and deem it unconstitutional and unjust.
Significance: Thurgood Marshall was later credited for ending segregation in the South with the Ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education.

Trials of Reconstruction

     The idea of reconstruction is partially questionable. Would a country that had been pushed to the brink of destruction be able to handle the sudden  change? After the war ended, most survivors had returned home to whatever they found was left. They tried to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives, and simultaneously had to deal with the fact that former slaves had now been given freedom. One of the most shocking, and perhaps even unfortunate, details of the reconstruction was that President Johnson had come into power. He was a Southerner at heart, and despite the fact that he had supported Lincoln's ambition of freeing all blacks in the South during the second half of the war, he was not so optimistic about trying to integrate former slaves into American Society. Those who had once kept them in bondage, had been pardoned and free to once again gain power in their respective positions. I also found it shocking that so many Blacks were accepted into American politics so eagerly after the war. He was the first "colored" senator in American history, and despite the relative failure that reconstruction had, it gave hope that people would come generations later and finish what he started.
       So now we fast forward more than one hundred years since Blacks gained their freedom and the country attempted to recover. Have we reached that status of equality that many thought would come after the end of the Civil War? Politically, all citizens, no matter what race or age, have the right to vote, the right to have their rights read to them, the right to a fair and speedy trial. But college students are still dominantly white, 84% of prisoners are colored, and financial levels are lower with Latino and black communities. There is obviously a huge gap between what we would consider to be equal and what we have today.
       That is not to say that things for minorities have not improved at all, quite the contrary, since the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, we have seen a flourish of minorities succeed. It seems that we are in the process of achieving Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. There is no doubt in my mind, that we are in the coarse of improving relations between all races in this country.