ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: October 2

Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice

What a fucking fall from grace for the Court. There has been a total of 116 Supreme Court Justices in American history, and only three of them have been Black. The first was awesome, the second the absolute fucking worst, and the United States is still stuck with him because people refused to listen to the warning testimony from a Black woman about what a piece of shit he is.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: October 2, 1967--

Thurgood Marshall (shown in photo) was the awesome one, an eminently competent man with a laudable history changing American law for the better. Marshall was the star pupil of Charles Houston, a Black Harvard Law graduate and Dean of Howard University Law School. Houston was known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow” for his dismantling of Jim Crow laws, which had enforced racial segregation after the Civil War. It was Marshall who took on his mentor’s dream of desegregating public schools, winning the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in the Supreme Court in 1957. After more years as a successful civil rights attorney, he was justifiably sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court on October 2, 1967, serving for exactly twenty-four years. During his tenure he vehemently opposed the death penalty and favored a woman’s right to choose.

But his replacement? Fucking ugh. Of course Clarence Thomas (NOT shown in photo because fuck that guy) was appointed by a Republican President (George Bush Sr.), and has proven to be both the most conservative and most corrupt member of the Court.

If only they had listened to Anita Hill’s warning testimony about Thomas.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, was sworn in on June 30, 2022.

More information about Anita Hill’s testimony, Thurgood Marshall’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education, and even the history of the death penalty can be found in my sweary history book. Get On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.

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