Happy Birthday, Walter Rhett!

Black surgical breakthrough in Chicago

Our 2004 Calendar! Click Here   Home What Happened on Your Birthday? Search the Registry by Category Search the Registry by Keyword and   Month Registry Poems or Lyrics Past Poems  or Lyrics Invest in The Registry The Registry Store Registry Sources Registry Press Release News About Us Contact   Jester Hairston, more than an actor! Our 2004 Calendar! Click Here   Home What Happened on Your Birthday? Search the Registry by Category Search the Registry by Keyword and   Month Registry Poems or Lyrics Past Poems  or Lyrics Invest in The Registry The Registry Store Registry Sources Registry Press Release News About Us Contact     July 9 Jester Hairston Jester Hairston was born on this date in 1901. He was an African-American choral composer and actor. The grandson of slaves from the Hairston plantation at Belew's Creek, North Carolina, Jester Hairston often had to suffer the indignities of Hollywood racism. A Cum Laude graduate from Tufts University, with a major in music, he also studied music at the famed Julliard School. He spent thirteen years as assistant conductor of the Hall Johnson Negro Choir where he often arranged and conducted choirs for Broadway. He first came to Hollywood in 1936 to conduct the choir work and spent fifteen years on radio and TV’s Amos 'n' Andy despite the fact that the other black characters were played by white actors. Hairston’s early acting roles included playing a “Witch Doctor” in the 1955 film, Tarzan's Hidden Jungle. TV fans perhaps best recognize Hairston as “Rolly Forbes” on the 1986 series Amen; his presence in Hollywood was often hidden on the other side of the camera. As one of the greatest choral music directors, Hairston composed or arranged more than 300 gospel spirituals in films such as Green Pastures and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. One of the first black actors in the Screen Actors Guild, among his notable works was the song “Amen” from the Sidney Poitier film, Lilies of the Field. Hairston died January 18, 2000, at the age of 98. White House appoints first Black cabinet member Our 2004 Calendar! Click Here   Home What Happened on Your Birthday? Search the Registry by Category Search the Registry by Keyword and   Month Registry Poems or Lyrics Past Poems  or Lyrics Invest in The Registry The Registry Store Registry Sources Registry Press Release News About Us Contact     July 9 On this date in 1955, E. Frederic Morrow became the first African-American to serve in an executive position on a United States president’s cabinet in the White House. Morrow was an adviser on business affairs in the Commerce Department before joining Eisenhower’s staff as Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961. As the sole African-American on a staff dealing with racial tensions related to integration, Morrow faced difficult personal and professional struggles in the White House. The Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. the Board of Education ruling, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Little Rock crisis were the backdrop for Morrow’s White House years. In an administration with a civil-rights policy that was at best cautious, Morrow was often frustrated and angered. Morrow as a black "first" found relations within the president’s "official family" to be "correct in conduct, but cold.” He published his autobiography, Black Man in the White House, in 1963 leaving a valuable account of his experience as an African-American working in the Eisenhower inner circle, including his disappointment with the indecision of president’s civil rights policy. One of New York's finest, June Jordan! Our 2004 Calendar! Click Here   Home What Happened on Your Birthday? Search the Registry by Category Search the Registry by Keyword and   Month Registry Poems or Lyrics Past Poems  or Lyrics Invest in The Registry The Registry Store Registry Sources Registry Press Release News About Us Contact     July 9 June Jordan June Jordan was born on this date in 1936. She was an African-American writer and educator. From Harlem, New York, Jordan was the daughter of Granville and Mildred Jordan, Jamaican natives. Her father was a night shift postal worker and her mother was a nurse. When she was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. During her high school years, she was "completely immersed in a white universe" while a student at Milwood High School and Northfield School for girls in Massachusetts. It was at Northfield, Jordan "discovered her poetic voice." her home circumstances were a source of conflict and anguish because of her father's physical abuse and her mother's denial. During these times as a young girl, Jordan's father taught her how to box; she has been fighting ever since. This environment resulted in Jordan's writing extensively about her parents and their positive and negative influences. In 1953, Jordan enrolled at Barnard College. Two years later, she married Michael Meyer, a student. While her husband completed graduate studies at the University of Chicago, Jordan continued her studies there until 1956 when she went to Barnard College, where she remained for a year. In 1958, she gave birth to her only child, Christopher David Meyer. Being in an interracial marriage in the 1950's was especially difficult due to societal attitudes and laws. In 1965, Jordan's marriage ended in divorce and Jordan faced the trials of being a single, working mother and forming her identity. Much of this challenge came forth in her writings. Her books of poetry include Things That I Do in the Dark (1977), Passion (1980), Living Room (1985), and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989). Other poems published are Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997 Anchor Books, (1997) and Haruko/Love Poems (1994). She is also the author of children's books, plays, a novel and Technical Difficulties (1994), Poetry for the People: A Blueprint for the Revolution (1995), a guide to writing, teaching and publishing poetry. Her collections of political essays include Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998). Basic Books published her memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, in 2000. Jordan has received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the National Association of Black Journalists Award, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People. June Jordan died of breast cancer on June 14, 2002, in Berkeley, California.

July 9 Provident Hospital On this date in 1893, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open-heart surgery without anesthesia at Provident hospital in Chicago. This facility was the first black-owned and operated hospital in America.

A common belief about African-Americans--perhaps a cliche--is that they often and regulary overeat. While there maybe be merit to the the idea--and the experience--the black community has an extensive repretorie of "eating" jokes rather than "fat" jokes, the high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, and digestive aliments in the African-American community are certainly no joke.

I was thinking about this as I ate lunch today.IO was alone. I had hoped to share share laughter and ideas. Instead, I swallowed excessive amounts of fried shrimp, garlic cooked string beans, fired potatoe sticks, steamed broccoli, rice noddles, wok stirred onions and peppers, pork chops, hot and sour soup, and shrimp fired rice. I did not know it was Nelson Mandela's birthday, although I had watched CNN and Headline News all morning.

I knew that the young waitress smiled immediately when she saw my face, and that gave me comfort and made me feel welcome. She immigrated fro Viet Nam less than three years ago, and speaks English expressively and well. Her "don't hurry" as she put the check down felt like "home,"---an invitation and reminder rather than the usual polite and cliched "thank you."

It was this feeling of peace, the celebration of its prosperity embued in this endless and overwhelming buffet, a buffet that communicated that the society we share is larger than our lives, but yet that society serves and offers to us its riches and fruit, its dreams that are made manifest, it was this unity of food, and a simple smile that attracted me to sit and get silly.

Before entering, I had left a company whose clerks I also knew. I had taken a project with me to show one of them my work. When I walked in she was one the phone. Talking to a girl friend about a boy friend. I had to ask her to check me out when I was ready. In between, she flipped through the books I brought, but her attention was gathered tot eh unseen problems on the phone.

The clerk in the first store was African-American. She is the exception to the common stereotype that black clearks are emotional, hostile, rude, combative, defiant, and sloppy, and indifferent. She laughs easily, smiles often, and is quick to assist. Yet today her priorities were misplaced. The customer was second to her friend's issue.

At the restuarant I borrowed a paper, the USA Today. As I read I thought of young African-american clerk whose youth lead her to switch focus. I thought of the young Vietamese girl who cleared tables, lifted a bucket of vanilla for the ice cream machine, and refilled glasses of tea and water. She had found work, learned a language, knew how to have fun, and remembered faces.

Both women move in and out of stereotypes, but both are independent and diligent. 

Isn't that what makes the USA today?

Draw Lebel the Bare-bones: Mozart and Charleston

by

Walter Rhett

M.A., Ohio State University and a Johns Hopkins University Fellow in Applied Behavoiral Science, 1986-87

     Wolfgang Mozart, born in 1756, composed music for soloists, small ensembles and orchestras, and his gift of writing intricately balanced lines of lilting melodies supported by flowing counter-melodies that resolve and change like images in a kaliescope has been enriched by time. His music is a monument to how the process of recognizing the immuatable qualities of great art is sustained by communities and how the meaning and appreciation of art is resoundingly deepened by history. Duke Ellington, who always told his audiences he "loved them madly," noted the power of time to illuminate gifts when he was passed over for the 1965 Pultizer prize. "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young," he remarked at what was clearly a racial slight by the Pultizer board. Duke was 67.

    Later, speaking to jazz writer Nat Hentoff, Duke said, "I'm hardly surprised. My kind of music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based music--classical music, if you will--is the only really respectable kind."

    Mozart's obstacles were different from Duke's, for sure. Their music differs, too. Yet they share a passion for exploring tone, swing, harmony, counterpoint. They both wrote furiously, compelling huge catalogues. They wrote in diverse forms and expanded orchestral techniques. They wrote for specific musicians and soloists. They wrote pieces commissioned by patrons. And they wrote music that reflected not only their own sensitivity, but also drew nearer the world around them.

  Mozart would have certainly understood Duke's passion for history, the cultures of cities, towns, and regions of the world, for capturing the life or world view of a place in music (as Duke did in "Black, Brown, and Beige," "Far Eastern Suite," "Caravan," or with Strayhorn's "A Train"), or for using music to elicit the mood and emotion of an experience ("Satin Doll," and "Mood Indigo" are examples).  According to Albert Murray, through music, Duke transformed the texture of the human experience. 

     Duke used the past and present, but he believed that music should always be a state of becoming. It is a special quality he shares with Mozart--and with all music of the great masters that lasts. The journey of their music--and their genius and gifts--is ever unfolding, leading to new places, offering the opportunity for new surprises, cradling new gifts, which await recognition and applause.

     From different eras, composing in different styles, traveling in different cities, Mozart and Ellington shared elements of a template common to artists who are gifted beyond their own born genius.  They are also linked by invisible but common threads that weave the cultural, political, and historical background of music.

     In Duke's background, James Ellington, Duke's grandfather, was born a slave in King and Queen County,Virgina, just south of Washington, D.C. The era of Mozart's life encompasses the height of the African slave trade that would have brought Duke's ancestor to North America and other Africans to South America and the eastward archepeligo of islands of the twin continents. The thousands of Africans imported to the New World begin their profound influence on the music and life of North and South American music and the islands during Mozart's life. While their genius is collective, their impact harder to discern, their lasting effects are equally as profound.

     Is it outrageous--even rhetorically, even more so, musically--to claim that the undocumented,  fragmented impact of a huge caste of foreign-born slaves--whose music was often at the time described as noise, unstructured, harsh rhythms without melody or intellect, unsophisticated, and carnal--could be seen as profound over time as the documented body of work, widely exposed, left by Mozart--who many agree is the world's greatest composer of any era and place? 

Charleston, A Place of Sites and Insights

      The city of Charleston, SC is an ideal place to examine Mozart's work against the background of the world's most significant economic institution and activity of Mozart's era, the African Atlantic slave trade and New World Slavery. That Mozart's and Duke's music resets convention, goes deeper, and breaks new ground without resting on its own laurels, is reason for Charleston to lead the examination of Mozart's work and life and times for influences and shared values from the global presence of Africa in the Age of Reason and Enlightment. Charleston, in music, architecture, law, trade, and worship is a colonial village which quickly merges as a global capital of the enlightment, often establishing itself by stretching, altering, and breaking the existing status quo. 

      Programs to highlight Mozart's gifts should also be careful to honor his process. Mozart's core values--creative freshness, new horizons, and music tying together aesthetic and history--should be used to uncover new relationships between Mozart's music and Africa past and present. In celebrating Mozart, his core values should be used as a platform for programs and performance, even if these cannot reach the heights which Mozart achieved in his music. 

     By this path, Mozart himself compells Charleston go beyond its usual denials, or its usual conventions of discussing Africa in terms of rice slavery, Gullah language and culture, and sweetgrass baskets. By the force of his own work, Mozart creates an opportunity for a catalogue of interactions, past and present; a discussion of similar elements of tone, structure, and form within the contrasting musical cultures; an awareness of slavery by the marking of events or experiences that surrounded Mozart; and an awareness of Mozart in the African community by recovered references. Already there are back channels open among independent and community scholars whose research adds depth and breath and new insights to the city's old canons about the African experience. A College of Charleston librarian from its North Charleston campus has developed and placed on the web an excellent timeline of Mozart's life paralled by timelines of key South Carolina, US, and world events, which include responses to the African presence.

     The newspaper, the Charleston Gazette, offers a snapshot of Charleston society the weeks before and after Mozart's birth on January 27th.

     James Laurens is dissolving his business partnership with Jacob Motte. (James is the brother of Henry Laurens, later named a United States peace commissioner, and sent to Paris to settle the matters of the American Revolution with France and England.)

     Deerskins are stable, being quoted at 14/6.

     Two Negro carpenters are available to be hired for entire coming year.

     On Mozart's birthday, the 27th, a "Parcel of choice, healthy grown Gambia Slaves just arrived on the Georgia Packet are to be sold at auction.

     In Jacksonboro, "at the public vendue," an auction of hogs, cattle, and cypress canoes includes 25 slaves, nearly all "country-born."

     The Library Society advertised for the returen of more than 55 volumes overdue.

     Ketch, a slave of Rev. Mr. Copp, ran away wearing leather stockings and a beaver hat. Ned, wearing negro cloth waist coat and breeches, ran away to a sea island "where he has fome relations" (family living there). Both Ned and Ketch "speak good English," according to their masters.

     Since November 1, 246,000 barrels of indigo had been exported.

The Power of Discourse and Community Exchange:

Mozart, Lowcountry Africa, and the Way We Perceive, Think About, and Value the World

     And what of the musical presence of Africans in Charleston at the time Mozart was busy writing his great compositions?

• As Mozart often accepted official commissions from governing officials (he was once concertmaster for the Archbishop of Salzburg), the city of Charleston employed and paid an African to be the city's ceremonial drummer (called a drum major) for official functions. The African drummer provided musical flourishes for honored guests, events, receptions, holidays, and other formal functions until 1865. He was accompanied by an paid African-American fife player, according to the research of a local music scholar.
  

A look at Mozart's compositions bring new questions and data to analyze.

• As Mozart wrote his operas, concertos, sympohonies, masses, African slaves in the Carolina lowcountry were developing a performance body of spirituals that described their work, faith, and history, sung by a capella chorus, accompained by newly invented instruments such as the banjo, beaded grouds, drawing upon a highly intuitively understood aesthetic based on a shared tradition of African community performance that covered timbre, polyrhythms, performance styles, and inner meaning. Why were the perceptions of these aesthetics and compositions so different? Why did earlier critics of African music fail so abysmally? Why did recogniton of Mozart's genius grow substantially over time?  What new language and terms, what new social content, allow the music of Mozart and Africa to gain fuller and fairer treatment? 
• Mozart was influenced by Masonic teachings. His opera, The Magic Flute, abounds with Masonic references. Did Masonic views effect slavery in Charleston?
• As a pianist Mozart performed works that he had thought out but never wrote down. How is this connected to the tradition of African improvising? Are their meta-music principles at work?
  

Mozart's works allow for reflections about the transcendant journey of the gifted and blessed, and about the highest levels of freedom. What is the meaning of freedom for Mozart in a time when Africans are being enslaved?

• The action of The Abduction From the Seraglio  takes place in Constanze, a Spanish noblewoman, Blonda, her English maid, and Pedrillo, a valet, are prisoners there, having been either shipwrecked or captured by pirates and sold into slavery. (Different versions of the libretto do not agree as these events occur before the curtain rises.) How do this and other operas (The Magic Flute has themes of slavery) reflect Mozart's view of human freedom--socially and philosophically? , a Spanish noblewoman, , her English maid, and , a valet, are prisoners there, having been either shipwrecked or captured by pirates and sold into slavery. (Different versions of the libretto do not agree as these events occur before the curtain rises.) How do this and other operas (The has themes of slavery) reflect Mozart's view of human freedom--socially and philosophically?
• Mozart, the servant-artisan, climbs the crystal stair of the inner passage of spirit and becomes the free-spirited creator. From his deathbed, he declares: "Now I must leave my art just as I had freed myself from the slavery of fashion, had broken the bonds of speculators and won the privilege of following my own feelings and composing freely and independently whatever my heart prompted." Do the lowcountry spirituals in their texts and context parallel Mozart's journey of inner freedom?
• One critic describes Mozart as being from those "deep recesses of the human spirit where opposites are identical." What are the ideals at the deepest levels shared by the musical opposites of Western and African music--seen through Mozart's compositions and the flourishing African-based music in the New World? How can this ideals and principles be applied to the experience of freedom, socially and spiritually? 
  

     As Mozart's genius is remembered, let not other genius be overlooked, forgotten, or lost. Let Charleston not do with slavery what Salzburg once did with Mozart--virtually forget the genius and overlook its contributions. For a heralded composer like Mozart who died and was buried in an unmarked grave outside of Vienna in the rain, Charleston, a city whose experiences of suffering and shunting--and of cultural flourishing, whose denial even today of its African genius, should provide a high tower of open arms that elevates its own legacy as declares the shared truths extracted from each step of reclaimed history. Harkening back to Spoleto's founding vision, and putting an old spin on to restore the metaphor, Charleston is a city that brings together two worlds. Charleston is a pluriverse, and it is time to open its "mutual estate."  The city is the perfect stage to link Mozart globally to the highest aesthetic of the African musical presence.

Notes

"Draw Lebel" is the name of an Carolina lowcountry rice spiritual sung by workers in the muck behind a rice mule. Its text addresses the blessed gifts of God evident in individuals, times, and places. It cites its belief in those blessings in the stanza, "the angels in heaven are coming down, coming down, coming down." Because this spiritual is sung while working, it refers not only to the second coming of Christ and the day of resurrection, glory, and revelation, but also to the outpouring of grace and mercy, the blessed gifts witnessed right now by those with strength of faith and open hearts who witness those touched by the Light.

Walter Rhett has been engaged in conducting, directing, administrating and writing about cross-cultural studies during his professional and academic life, creating paradigms, categories, comparisons and experiences that open up higher insights for how different cultures use diverse forms to share and express the same universal experiences. He is an urban historian, a citizen-scholar, a role in African society held by the griot, a title by which he is often referred. The success of his work depends upon its merit and community goodwill. Rhett organized Charleston's only centennial event for Duke Ellington's birthday, a concert presentation of Duke songs by Ann Caldwell. Currently he owns a Charleston touring company, Rhett's Charleston, through which his cross-cultural efforts are focused. E-mail him at walterrhett@yahoo.com. He is available to think outside the box, speak to groups, participate in panels, lead tours, and innovate in print. His company's motto is "looking at the past, leading the way."

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Year C

Jeremiah 17:5-10
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 6:17-26
Psalm 1

O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Thus says the LORD:

Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals

and make mere flesh their strength,

whose hearts turn away from the LORD.

They shall be like a shrub in the desert,

and shall not see when relief comes.

They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,

in an uninhabited salt land.

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD,

whose trust is the LORD.

They shall be like a tree planted by water,

sending out its roots by the stream.

It shall not fear when heat comes,

and its leaves shall stay green;

in the year of drought it is not anxious,

and it does not cease to bear fruit.

The heart is devious above all else;

it is perverse--

who can understand it?

I the LORD test the mind

and search the heart,

to give to all according to their ways,

according to the fruit of their doings.

Psalm 1 Page 585, BCP

Beatus vir qui non abiit

1

Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, *
nor lingered in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the seats of the scornful!

2

Their delight is in the law of the LORD, *
and they meditate on his law day and night.

3

They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; *
everything they do shall prosper.

4

It is not so with the wicked; *
they are like chaff which the wind blows away.

5

Therefore the wicked shall not stand upright when judgment comes, *
nor the sinner in the council of the righteous.

6

For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, *
but the way of the wicked is doomed.

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ--whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

Luke 6:17-26

Jesus came down with the twelve apostles, and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

 

"Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

 

"Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

 

"Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

"Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

"But woe to you who are rich,

for you have received your consolation.

 

"Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry.

 

"Woe to you who are laughing now,

for you will mourn and weep.

"Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

gives us a chance to recall many of the famous men who sat on the Unitied States Supreme Court. Charlestonian John Rutledge was once appointed acting chief Justice, but died before his appointment was voted upon by the Senate committee. Virginian John Marshall was the most noted of ante-bellum jurists; Californian Chief Justice Earl Warren lead the court in the fifties to decisions that restructed merican society. Abe Fortas was a brilliant jurist, thwarted by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. Those dark-robed figures delibrate the limits and conditions of behavior within our society and capture our attention ech October when the Court convenves. Thurgood Marshall before sitting on the Court won more cases before the court than any other judge in American history. Included in these was the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka, KS which included a little known South Carolina case, Briggs v. Clarendon County, which sues for equal resources for black and white students in Clarendon County schools, just 75 miles north of Chaarleston. (Many say that the Brown decision drew in legal and moral precedent from the decision of Charleston Judge Waites Waring, who ordered the desegregation of local facilities.) This essay article by Juan Williams reviews Marshall's life.  

This is the January 1990 Washington Post Magazine cover story that Juan Williams wrote profiling the reclusive Marshall.  The 81-year-old justice had served on the court for 23 years and would retire only one year later in June of 1991.  Based on six months of interviews, this piece offered a rare glimpse into the life of an historic figure and would become the foundation for the biography Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.

Marshall's Law
by Juan Williams
January 7, 1990

In the segregated South, when hope dimmed, oppressed blacks used to whisper his name. His legal strategy fueled the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Now Thurgood Marshall  the first black Supreme Court justice and still the most powerful black person in America  looks back on his historic career

A TALL, THICK, AGING BLACK MAN STEPS OUT OF A LIMOUSINE AND SLOWLY MAKES his way into the SheratonWashington Hotel. As he trudges toward the ballroom where he is scheduled to give one of his rare speeches, black bellhops and maids and doormen freeze in place, pointing. Black waiters and waitresses begin streaming out of the kitchen for a glimpse of the man. Elderly black people, some with tears in their eyes, stand on tiptoes to see better and wave.

A white man, obviously awed by the emotional reaction of those around him, taps a black man on the am: "What's goin' on? Who is that guy?"

"That's Thurgood Marshall."

The white man seems almost confused: "He's one of those Supreme Court judges, right?"

To many, if not most, white Americans, Thurgood Marshall is not a lot more than "one of those Supreme Court judges." They don't doubt that he is an important and honored man in American life, but he is only one of hundreds of equally important and powerful people in the country. Many saw his appointment to the court by Lyndon Johnson as a political response, even a gesture of appeasement, to the power of the civil rights movement.

In American universities and law schools, the opinions of Thurgood Marshall aren't ranked with those of John Marshall or Louis Brandeis. Within the realm of the high court and its place in history, white America may never afford Marshall its highest honors.

Yet if whites could see Thurgood Marshall more clearly, they might see the most important black man of this century  a man who rose higher than any black person before him and who has had more effect on black lives than any other person, black or white. Perhaps even more important to many blacks, Marshall got where he is the hard way  by risking his life and reputation to help them.

Twentytwo years ago, even before Marshall broke the 178year color barrier on the Supreme Court, Newsweek magazine wrote: "In three decades he has probably done as much to transform the life of his people as any Negro alive today, including Nobel laureate Martin Luther King." The accolade was deserved. Marshall built his reputation slowly, in backwater southern towns, overwhelmed but not overmatched by a twisted white justice wrought by judges and sheriffs who had few second thoughts about beating in black heads. Often the only hope among blacks in these small communities was expressed in a quiet, angry threat, whispered like code: Thurgood is coming.

"When I think of great American lawyers, I think of Thurgood Marshall, Abe Lincoln and Daniel Webster," says Thomas G. Krattenmaker, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center. "In this century only Earl Warren approaches Marshall. He is certainly the most important lawyer of the 20th century."

Marshall is the only black leader in American history who can argue that he defeated segregation where it really counts  in court. Devising a legal strategy based on the Constitution, he forced rights to be extended equally to even the poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Martin Luther King Jr. would not have won his first victory, the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, if Marshall's legal team at the NAACP had not first won a Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on buses. And it was Marshall who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, ending segregation in public schools.

"For black people he holds special significance because it was Thurgood, Charles Houston (Marshall's law professor) and a few others who told us we could get justice through interpretation of the law," says Duke law professor John Hope Franklin, author of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. "Marshall was at the head of these lawyers who told us to hold fast because they were going to get the law on our side. And they did."

Once on the court, Marshall continued the battle, fighting against the death penalty and for individual rights  freedom of the press, privacy and due process. His efforts have not gone unnoticed. "He is almost an exact contemporary of mine," says Erwin Griswold, a former dean of the Harvard Law School and former solicitor general who is regarded as an expert on the Supreme Court. "I have watched him for all these years. First, he was an extremely resourceful and energetic advocate in the late 1930s and 1940s, trying difficult cases all over the South with great skill and often much courage. He changed America. And then as a judge on the court of appeals and as solicitor general he upheld the best standards of the legal profession. And now he has been on the Supreme Court for 22 years and has had a distinguished record not only through votes on civil rights but on technical legal questions of varying issues. He has been a strong constitutional influence for the proper, sound development of the law and ranks among the strongest members of the Supreme Court in this century."

"Thurgood Marshall is the living embodiment of how far we Americans have come on the major concern in our history  race  and how far we've got to go,'' says Drew Days, professor of law at Yale and former assistant attorney general for civil rights. "He has been a conscience. In the law he remains our supreme conscience."

Marshall has argued more cases before the court  32  than any justice now sitting. He won 29 of them. Marshall alone among the justices can say he has defended a man charged with murder. And only Marshall can say what it feels like to be black in America.

He has been much more than a minority spokesman. Says John Hope Franklin: "If you study the history of Marshall's career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand that when he speaks, he is not speaking just for black Americans but for Americans of all times. He reminds us constantly of the great promise this country has made of equality, and he reminds us that it has not been fulfilled. Through his life he has been a great watchdog, insisting that this nation live up to the Constitution."

But in black America, Thurgood Marshall has become a doubly potent symbol: the protector fighting for the rights of individuals in a whitemajority society still stained with racism, and the personification of black achievement. No black American has ever held a higher government office, and none will until a black person is elected president.

THURGOOD MARSHALL'S THINNING SILVER hair is combed straight back. At 81, his wife and friends complain, he is heavier than ever because he refuses to exercise. He wears two hearing aids, and sometimes his still smooth face is suddenly etched with tears caused by glaucoma that keeps him from driving and forces him to hold papers close to his eyes as he reads. But he reads constantly. His massive desk at the court is covered with papers, letters, law books and pictures. There is a picture of his grandson, Thurgood William Marshall (whose middle name honors Marshall's friend Justice William Brennan). Also on the desk is a small bust of Frederick Douglass, the black antislavery writer who is Marshall's hero. And there is a picture of Marshall with his wife. It was taken recently after Marshall finally agreed to have painted the portrait of him that will hang in the Supreme Court after his death.

Save for a 1988 documentary he did with Carl Rowan, Marshall hasn't given any interviews while on the court. As he talks about his extraordinary career, his voice is gruff; he often mumbles or gives brusque answers to questions.

Marshall's life is a reflection of the changing 20th century. It began in a sharply segregated town of ordinary people Baltimore  in 1908. Baltimore was a town where blacks attended "colored schools" run by a white superintendent who said he wouldn't build a swimming pool for students because "Negroes don't deserve swimming pools." It was a town where the parochial schools let students out 10 minutes earlier than the black public schools to minimize fights between the two groups. Not a single department store in Baltimore was open to blacks, not a single restroom that blacks could use was to be found downtown.

"The only thing different between the South and Baltimore was trolley cars," recalls Marshall. "They weren't segregated. Everything else was segregated."

As a boy, Marshall did not have a burning desire to fight segregation. He says he rarely felt uncomfortable about race. He lived in a nice house on Druid Hill Avenue, and both of his parents worked. His mother taught kindergarten, and his father held a variety of jobs, including working as the steward at the prestigious Gibson Island Club on Chesapeake Bay. Marshall was the greatgrandson of a slave named Thoroughgood  Marshall shortened it to Thurgood  but both his grandfathers owned large grocery stores in Baltimore.

AS young Thurgood grew, his parents and grandparents encouraged him to adjust to segregation, not to fight it. There was even teasing about it, family jokes. Marshall's father, William Canfield Marshall, a paleskinned, blueeyed man who could have passed for white, used to say, "There's a white man in the woodpile," or "That's mighty black of you." Well, the truth is you learn to take it, Marshall says. "I was taught to go along with it, not to fight it unless you could win it. The only thing was if somebody calls you a nigger." His father ordered Marshall to fight if anyone called him that.

Marshall's high school life was full of circumstances that would later prove to be significant. As a mediocre student and a cutup, he was frequently punished, made to read the U.S. Constitution aloud. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew it by heart. The school he attended was located next to a police station. Marshall remembers spending afternoons listening to the police beat up black prisoners and tell some to shut up before they talked themselves into a death sentence. For amusement, Marshall's father would occasionally take his son down to the local courthouse to watch trials.

In September 1925, Marshall went off to Lincoln University in Oxford, Pa., a premed student hoping eventually to graduate from dental school. But he had problems at Lincoln. He and the biology teacher argued constantly, and Marshall failed the course. He was thrown out of the college twice for fraternity pranks.

Then, in his junior year he married Vivian "Buster" Burey, a beautiful, energetic student at the University of Pennsylvania he had met on a weekend trip. In some ways he began to settle down. In other ways he was just beginning to become unsettled.

At Lincoln, a school for bright, black males founded by a Presbyterian minister and staffed by an allwhite faculty, Marshall at first showed little interest in civil rights issues. Some of his fellow students began to argue with him about his indifference. They would ask him why he hadn't challenged segregation in Baltimore, why he hadn't used white bathrooms or sat in the white sections of movie theaters. Then came a schoolwide vote: Should the Lincoln faculty be integrated? Marshall voted with the majority  twothirds of Lincoln's upperclassmen  to keep the faculty allwhite.

Classmates wanted Marshall on their side  for integration  when the issue came up again. Among them were Cab Calloway, who went on to tame as a cabaret dancer; Langston Hughes, the writer, who later described Marshall at college as "the loudest individual in the dormitory, goodnatured, rough, ready and uncouth"; U. Simpson Tate, who later worked with Marshall on civil rights cases; and Nnamdi Azikiwe, who became president of Nigeria. (Kwame Nkrumah, who became president of Ghana, also went to Lincoln and became a friend of Marshall's, although he graduated much later.) Hughes in particular pressed Marshall on the faculty integration question, arguing that lack of support for black teachers was evidence of the students' "belief in their own inferiority." The debate started a radical shift in Marshall's thinking. His mother had taught him to go along so he could get along in a segregated world, but his father's more subtle message, he began to realize, was to fight. Confused, Marshall went to his favorite professor, sociologist Robert M. Labaree. Labaree told Marshall he should be fighting segregation and the faculty should be integrated.

When the issue came up again, Marshall voted for integration. The faculty was integrated two years after that vote.

After graduating from Lincoln in 1930 with a degree in humanities, Marshall enrolled at Howard University's allblack law school in Washington, making daily train trips there from his parents' home in Baltimore, where he lived with his wife.

In law school, the same message Marshall had heard from his father, from Labaree and from his college classmates  don't accept segregation _ started to come at him again. Charles H. Houston had transformed Howard's law school from a "dummy's retreat" night school to a rigorous day school for students committed to using legal knowledge to change segregated society. Marshall would later say that everything he knew about the law Houston had pounded into his head. "He taught us with an emphasis on the Constitution," Marshall recalls. "And basically, he said you had to be not as good as the average white lawyer, you had to be better, because you wouldn't get a break on an even basis. He would tell us that the secret was hard work and digging out the facts and the law.

.'When I was in law school in my first year, I lost 30 pounds solely from work, intellectual work, studying. And that's how you get ahead of people." Marshall says Houston's message to him was that "lawyers were to bear the brunt of getting rid of segregation, and he made public statements that we would become social engineers rather than lawyers." Although his class began as a group of more than 30 students, only six graduated. The No. 1 student was Thurgood Marshall.

Among the lecturers for the school, then located at Fifth and D streets NW, Houston brought in stars like Felix Frankfurter and Clarence Darrow. Marshall remembers Darrow telling him that a good lawyer studied sociology as much as he studied the law. Years later, when Darrow died, his widow gave all his cases dealing with civil rights to Marshall.

In his last year of law school, Marshall and some of his classmates began reviewing the D.C. Code 'just for fun," only to discover it prohibited blacks from voting. The discovery became a cause, and eventually Congress put a civil rights clause into the code. For the first time, Marshall focused on what would become his life's work fighting segregation.

After graduation, in an effort to impress on his star pupil the devastation of segregation, Houston took Marshall with him on a trip through the South. Traveling anonymously in Houston's old automobile, and prohibited from patronizing most motels and restaurants, they stayed overnight with local black lawyers and ate from bags of fruit they carried with them. Shortly after their return, Houston had Marshall assist him in the case of George Crawford, a black man charged with murdering a white man in Loudoun County, Va. After a strong defense, Crawford was convicted and given life.

"We won it," Marshall says. "If you got a Negro charged with killing a white person in Virginia and you got life imprisonment, then you've won. Normally they were hanging them in those days."

HOUSTON WENT ON TO NEW YORK TO RUN THE NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund while Marshall returned to Baltimore to open a oneman law firm. His mother took the rug off her living room floor and put it in his otherwise bare office. He took what cases he could get, developing a reputation as a lawyer who would help poor blacks.

"A woman walked into my office one day, a colored woman from South Carolina, and she had a case and she didn't have any money," Marshall remembers. "So I said, 'Well, madam, please tell me: How did you happen to get to me?' And she said, 'In my home town in South Carolina, when we has trouble we goes to the judge, and the judge tells us what to do. So I went over to the courthouse, and when I saw the sign "Judge," I went in and told him of my problem and he said, "We don't operate that way up here. You need a lawyer." And she said she didn't have any money. And he said, 'You go down to this lawyer Marshall. He's a freebie.'

"So I said, 'I've got to stop that nonsense right now.' "

Though he couldn't afford it, Marshall still made time for the fight against segregation. Representing the local NAACP, he negotiated with white store owners who sold to blacks but would not hire them. He joined John L. Lewis's effort to unionize black and white steelworkers. And he convinced a college graduate who wanted to go to law school to apply to the University of Maryland, which did not accept blacks into its law school program. Marshall had considered applying to Maryland himself after he graduated from college but decided it would be hopeless. Now he was taking the law school to court.

Houston came to Baltimore and helped argue the case. During the proceedings, Marshall told the court: "What is at stake here is more than the rights of my client; it is the moral commitment stated in our country's creed." No one expected Marshall and Houston to win; they were simply trying to set up a case that could be appealed. "We were hoping to get to the Supreme Court any way we could," Marshall says. "But Judge Eugene O'Dunne said no. He said we won right there."

"The colored people in Baltimore were on fire when Thurgood did that  recalls Juanita Jackson Mitchell, an NAACP activist in Baltimore. "They were euphoric with victory . . . We didn't know about the Constitution. He brought us the Constitution as a document like Moses brought his people the Ten Commandments."

It was during these heady, early days of practice that many of Marshall's ideas about the fallibility of the law would be developed. For example, his repeated contact with black defendants accused of capital crimes helped convince him that his fellow man should not be given the power to condemn others to death. He remembers many stories about lives that could easily have been snuffed out by the capriciousness of the white man's law.

One night, he says, he got a call from Frederick, Md., warning that a lynching was about to take place. A black man had been charged with attempting to rape the white daughter of a bank president. Marshall got into his '29 Ford and raced to Frederick. A local judge had stopped the lynching, but he told Marshall it had been close. A mob had captured a suspect and brought him to the young woman to be identified.

"She was laying on the sofa in her home in pain because he broke her jaw," Marshall says, "and she said, 'Yeah, that's him.' And the mob was ready, and they barely got him to the front door when she said, 'Wait a minute. Bring him back.' And they brought him back in, and she said, 'That's not the man.' So the chief of police said, 'Now why did you change your mind like that?" She said, 'The guy that attempted to rape me had his belt buckle on the side, and that one's got it right there.' So they went out, and they found a guy that looked like this guy's twin brother. And they weren't even related. Now you see how easy that would have been? That innocent man would have been lynched."

AFTER THREE YEARS OF PRIVATE PRACTICE, Marshall was invited by Houston to join the NAACP's national office in New York as assistant special counsel. Two years later, Houston returned to his family practice in Washington. Mar