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On Broadway, Laurence Fishburne, Yale Profs Discuss Marshall Legacy

By Dan Slater

The Law Blog hoofed it up to Broadway last night to check out the Booth Theatre’s production of “Thurgood,” a one-man show about the life of Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, portrayed by Laurence Fishburne (”The Matrix,” “Searching for Bobby Fischer”). Seated next to a Heller Ehrman attorney, in a theater chock-full of lawyers, we watched Fishburne strut his stuff and deliver a compelling history lesson through the lens of Marshall’s life (1908-1993).

After the play, which was co-produced by Yale law school alum Eric Falkenstein (”The History Boys,” “The Seafarer”), three Yale law profs and former Marshall clerks — Owen Fiss, Stephen Carter and Dan Kahan — took the stage, along with Fishburne, to discuss their impressions of his performance and how the play jibed with their recollections of Justice Marshall.

In his post-show dress of Nikes, khaki pants and an orange t-shirt from Newark’s Weequahic High School (he said it was a gift), Fishburne told the audience that the goal of the show was to leave them with the feeling that they’d spent a personal, intimate night with Marshall.

Fiss, who clerked for Marshall in 1964 when he was still on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, begged to differ with Fishburne’s assessment, but only to congratulate him further. He said the show was more than an intimate portrayal of Marshall’s life, that it also showed Marshall’s unique position in American history as one of the drivers of what Professor Fiss called “the Second Reconstruction.” Fiss said that, despite some rights being “savaged by the Rehnquist court,” we can now look back on an era that Marshall helped shepherd into existence, an era that has seen the rise of Marshall’s ideals and a new black middle class. Fiss said he thought this so-called Second Reconstruction was now at an end, though he and Fishburne agreed that there was still a lot of work to be done in the slums of cities like New Orleans, Baltimore and New York.

As a lawyer, Marshall, of course, is best known for defeating John Davis, the lawyer who represented the Topeka school board in the 1954 desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education. As a sad coda to last night’s show, and to Professor Fiss’s pronouncement that the ideals Marshall stood for have now been mostly realized, today the NYT is reporting that Zelma Henderson, a Kansas beautician who was the sole surviving plaintiff in Brown, died on Tuesday in Topeka. She was 88 and had lived in Topeka all her adult life.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 22, 2008 (boomark / email).