October 2 · This Day in America
Chief Justice Earl Warren administers the oath, and Thurgood Marshall becomes the first Black justice in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. He had argued before this same Court many times — most famously Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the case that ended the legal fiction of separate but equal. As chief counsel for the NAACP, he had spent decades dismantling segregation one courtroom at a time, traveling the South where a wrong turn could cost a Black lawyer his life. Now he would sit on the highest bench in the land and read the Constitution back to the country that had once denied he was fully part of it. For twenty-four years he would dissent, insist, and refuse to look away from injustice. The boy from Baltimore who was kept out of his state's law school because of his color now decided what the law meant.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1780
Caught with the West Point plans hidden in his boot — the proof of Benedict Arnold's treason — the British officer John André is hanged at Tappan, New York. He was, by most accounts, gallant to the end, and his American captors admired him even as they killed him. Arnold escaped to the British. André did not. His one request, to die by firing squad rather than the rope, was denied.
Source: www.loc.gov
“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”Thurgood Marshall, 1992