Startspeaks: Thurgood Marshall, Public Defenders, and How the Quality of One’s Intent Is Evident in the Results
“What is the quality of your intent?”
Last week, my office honored me with the Thurgood Marshall “Intricate Planner and Defender of the Poor” Award during our holiday party. I was definitely caught off guard. Every defender in my office is amazing in one way or another, so when my boss started to describe the recipient and I soon realized it was me, I felt pretty f***in’ bad a$$. My office, the Solano County Alternate Public Defender, totally rocked this holiday party. Out of the 3 attorney awards: Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Darrow and Clara Shortridge Foltz, our office got 2 and out of the 4 Honorable Mentions, we got 3! Way to represent. So naturally, as soon as I got home, I geeked out and went on a Thurgood Marshall Googling spree fully embracing the honor.
So, what did I learn?
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s intent was relentless, unparalleled, forward-thinking, and humanely genuinely unwavering and supremely EPIC. Arguably, he’s the most instrumental figure of the Civil Rights Movement (alongside MLK and Malcolm X). He’s dubbed as the leader with a legal philosophy of “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” And he did, and thereafter the law. He said F#$K racial segregation, F%@K racial discrimination, I’m going to change the nation and the Supreme Court agreed!
He was an advocate of the people, the poor, the disadvantaged, the discriminated and downtrodden. He used the Constitution as the tool to advance social justice, to fight racism, to demand liberty, justice, equality and fairness for all. And he was Black. He owned his blackness and as a Black man of the people and for the people, he echoed it straight from his core. Justice Marshall took his truth — his own personal experience of racism through denial from a law school — and intricately weaved his activism into a master plan of desegregation for the benefit of all. He was a social creator and manipulated the law to righteously achieve justice. And he believed it was his personal responsibility to not believe otherwise. He did not compromise his values for the greater good, his values were already preordained to the greater good. Not only was he a champion for African-Americans, he was a champion of justice for humanity.
And behind every great man is a great woman. Did you know he married a Filipina and together they had two children? Shout out to Cecilia “Sissy” Suyat Marshall! Ladies and gents, Justice Thurgood Marshall had excellent taste in women. ;o) One would think of working ten years to become the kind of lawyer I am today, I would have picked up on that awesome fact sooner than October 2015 (Filipino American History Month). So what had happened was…
Thurgood Marshall is most notable as the legal champion behind Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools overturning the doctrine of “separate but equal” established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. He is also the first African-American appointed to serve on the United States Supreme Court bench. His father, William Marshall, the grandson of a slave, worked as a steward and his mother was a teacher. William Marshall would take his two sons to the local courthouse in Maryland and afterwards, they would take the cases home and argue at the dinner table five out of seven nights’ a week. Thurgood was a star member of his high school debate team and a troublemaker. He memorized the entire United States Constitution as a teacher’s punishment for misbehaving in class. He attended Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania. There, he joined other remarkably distinguished Black students like Kwame Nkrumah (the future president of Ghana) and Langston Hughes (one of the greatest poets of all time).
Thurgood Marshall personally experienced racism when despite being overqualified academically, he was rejected because of his race from the University of Maryland law school. Instead of Maryland, Marshall attended law school in Washington, D.C. at Howard University, another historically black school. While at Howard, he served under acclaimed African-American civil rights lawyer and the dean of the law school, Charles Houston.
After earning his degree and an attempt to go into a solo legal practice, Thurgood Marshall and his mentor, Charles Houston, defended Donald Murray in Murray v. Pearson. Murray had been denied entrance into the University of Maryland Law School, but this time, Thurgood Marshall did not accept rejection for a well-qualified candidate. Marshall and Houston won Murray v. Pearson in January 1936, the first in a long string of cases designed to undermine the legal basis for de jure racial segregation in the United States.
Shortly thereafter, Thurgood worked as legal counsel for the NAACP, meeting his future wifey and climbing the ranks. His first victory before the Supreme Court came in Chambers v. Florida (1940), when he successfully defended four black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police. As a public defender who has represented a host of clients — both adult and juvenile, false confessions are more common than most of society thinks — did you know that 1 out of 4 people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence actually made a false confession or incriminating statement?
After winning 29 of the 32 civil rights cases that he brought before the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall earned the reputation of “America’s outstanding civil rights lawyer.” Despite numerous death threats in the South, Thurgood Marshall kept right on, winning some of the most important cases in U.S. history and setting constitutional precedents like Smith v. Allwright (1944), which gave African Americans the right to vote in Democratic primary elections and Morgan v. Virginia (1946), which outlawed the state’s policy of segregation as it applied to bus transportation between different states. The NAACP also sent Marshall to Japan and Korea where he investigated complaints of African American soldiers being convicted by U.S. Army courts-martial who had not received fair trials. Marshall was successful, his appeal arguments led to reduced sentences for 22 of the 40 soldiers.
Thurgood Marshall’s landmark success in Brown v. Board provided the legal foundation and inspiration for the American Civil Rights Movement. And after serving as a circuit judge for four years, Marshall was appointed to serve as the first Black U.S. Solicitor General, winning 14 of the 19 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court.
On October 2, 1967, Marshall was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, becoming the first African-American to serve on our nation’s highest court. As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall consistently supported rulings upholding a strong protection of individual rights and liberal interpretations of controversial social issues. Most notably, Thurgood Marshall ruled in favor of the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade and in Furman v. Georgia, Marshall articulated his opinion that the death penalty was unconstitutional in all circumstances, which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty back then. Justice Marshall, we need you back, now!
Credit is overwhelmingly due to this dignified and superbly skillful human being for his being, Go Justice Thurgood Marshall!
So what is the quality of my intent as a public defender? Zealous, hardworking, innovative, thorough, effective and relentless advocacy. Yup, I said it. And it may be the ego speaking, but in this circumstance it’s also my truth. Public defenders are courageous litigators motivated by our duty-bound oath to stand between the accused and the power of the state. Jonathan Rapping, a public defender and founder/president of Gideon’s Promise, said it best:
Word.
So the way I see it, we’re an interesting sub-species of humankind, us public defenders: stressed out underdogs toiling in a system of poetic backwards injustice. With a sword in a hand we defend and protect those who have been written off by society as impugned and abhorred. And with the scales of justice, we use our position and knowledge to demand dignity, respect and fair access to our fellow beings. Our position of power serves a greater good, it serves a greater cause: the cause of transforming the culture of injustice one client, one human being, at a time. Indeed, what an honorable and incredibly meaningful call it is.
So what is the quality of your intent? Is it to mean well? To do well? To be well? Is it to stand by and with and behind your values? Is it to get over yourself and your ego and transcend beyond space and time into the present reality that life is and can be whatever you want it to be? And if its not where you want it to be, what can you do about it now? Can you put your intent into action or will you let your intent simply sit in a stagnant state of mind? Is your intent temporary and fleeting or permanent and enduring? Can you build upon your intent, progress from it, and evolve? What is the impact of your intent? Can it be echoed? Is its force so strong that it shatters boundaries beyond dimension? What is the truth of your intent and how achievable is it for you to breath it, grow it, be it, and lead from it? The quality of your intent will be evident in the results produced.
So I pose to you my favorite Justice Thurgood Marshall passage:
“What is the quality of your intent? Certain people have a way of saying things that shake us at the core. Even when the words do not seem harsh or offensive, the impact is shattering. What we could be experiencing is the intent behind the words. When we intend to do good, we do. When we intend to do harm, it happens. What each of us must come to realize is that our intent always comes through. We cannot sugarcoat the feelings in our heart of hearts. The emotion is the energy that motivates. We cannot ignore what we really want to create. We should be honest and do it the way we feel it. What we owe to ourselves and around is to examine the reasons of our true intent. My intent will be evident in the results.”
— Justice Thurgood Marshall
On a lesson front, when I reflect back on the quality of my intent and the results that my intent has produced, I’m proud of my humanity and my desires to grow and to lead and to empower. I realize that the quality of my intent speaks to my truth as a human being first and foremost. I recognize that the truth of my intent comes from my genuine desire to be a good person and to serve in all ways that I am capable of serving — whether it be serving as a lawyer, a coach, a family member, a friend, or person. And it is beautiful for me to see that I stand by the same beliefs and values that I stood by as a youthful attorney, as a first year law student and as a college graduate who knew she wanted to be a public defender.
I’d like to end this blog entry by sharing a poem I wrote as part of my application for the Queen’s Bench Agnes O’Brien scholarship during my first year of law school which seven years later sits posted on my office wall today:
It’s pretty rad for me to read what I produced and officially think to myself:
Christine Start, the quality of your intent holds water! You may not have won the Agnes O’Brien scholarship during law school, but #hello Thurgood Marshall Award, your expectations exceeded more than what you intended ;)
What if instead of trying to differentiate myself from or compare myself to someone, I took a bit of his or her most attractive quality and said You are me, I am you … How free would I be knowing I believed we are one? #startism
