| When The New Yorker profiled Thurgood Marshall in March, 1956, he was still eleven years shy of his nomination to the Supreme Court—but already among the most effective and influential lawyers ever to argue before it. As the N.A.A.C.P.’s Special Counsel, Marshall had won fourteen of the sixteen civil-rights cases he’d brought to the Court, earning “the stature of semi-legendary folk hero” among his supporters. To report the article, the writer Bernard Taper travelled with his subject from New York City—Marshall lived in Harlem—to an N.A.A.C.P. meeting in Atlanta, a metropolis with only three hotels open to African Americans. (“Atlanta is better off in this respect than many Southern cities, several of which have no public accommodations” for African American visitors, Taper was told.) This week marks the anniversary of both Marshall’s swearing-in to and retirement from the Court, where he served as the first Black Justice from 1967 to 1991. The New Yorker profile offers a fascinating glimpse of the period before his appointment, a time when Marshall could chain-smoke on the flight to Georgia and the fight to desegregate schools was progressing but far from a sure thing. Rosa Parks is referred to not by name but as a “weary middle-aged Negro seamstress” arrested in Montogmery just a few months before. Taper is struck by the low-key efficiency and determination displayed at the N.A.A.C.P. meeting, which is punctuated by mordant humor about lynchings—and then the news, in the late afternoon, about the killing of a physician and activist named Thomas H. Brewer. Whatever the tragedy’s emotional impact, it didn’t distract Marshall from his work. “All right,” he tells a pair of fellow N.A.A.C.P. lawyers, after a minute of silence. “Let’s start with the Prince Edward County case and go all through that before we take up the other. And I guess we’d better get going on it because we’ve got a lot to do tonight.” | 
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