Thurgood Marshall Quotes
... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.
Thurgood Marshall, 1909-1993, U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Newsweek, September 21, 1987
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He even paraphrased it in one of his opinions.
Bilbo was one of the worst racists who ever served in the Congress.
Blacks were fighting and dying in WWII. They were equal when they were under fire, but otherwise not. The war was against fascist protagonists whose creed was inequality while the allies were upholding freedom and equality. But making that aspiration a reality was difficult.
This became one of the most widely quoted statements of the 1960s and 1970s.
When passed, the Social Security Act did not cover domestic or agricultural workers. But these were the two occupations that between employed over half of all African Americans. The Black labor leaders like A. Phillip Randolph, supported the Act as their union membership was covered. The Congress, although controlled by the Democrats had the albatross of the "Solid South" which would obstruct anything that would strengthen the Negro. The strategy the President Roosevelt and his new dealers adopted was to institutionalize Social Security for the majority of American workers and then bring in the occupations and groups that had originally been excluded. And this is what they did however, enforcement of Social Security coverage with individual domestic workers was still a problem in the 21st century.
In 1862 the president requested a $600,000 congressional appropriation to finance a pilot program for Negroes freed by the Civil War to emigrate to Africa. He met with a delegation of Black leaders:
Ames was not a native Southerner but as a General of the Union Army he had been the military commander of the wartime district of Arkansas and Mississippi where he became sufficiently popular to be elected Senator. However, once the segregationists returned to political power, Ames lost his bid for reelection amidst a massive, vicious campaign of intimidating Blacks from voting combined with local, rural corruption of the local balloting process. Ames also served as a general in the Spanish American War and was the last surviving Civil War general.
Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education.
