THE LAW: The Tension of Change

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For Conscience & Repute. The name indelibly stamped on this victory is that of Thurgood Marshall, 47, counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He is at his sincerest and loudest (and that is very sincere and quite loud) in declaring that he is only one of the millions, white and Negro, whose courage, sweat, skill, imagination and common sense made the victory possible. Like all great victories, the school-desegregation decision opened up terrifying vistas of future obstacles and perils for all Americans. Most centrally and immediately, Marshall must deal with the future course of desegregation and the intertwined issues of the social revolution of which he is a leading figure. He cannot set the course, not even for the N.A.A.C.P. But what he decides to do about a thousand practical legal questions will interact powerfully with the decisions and attitudes of other men of similar and quite different and opposite views. The resultant of these forces will determine the pace, the style and the success of an effort to remove from U.S. life a paralyzing sting in its conscience and the ugliest blot upon its good name in the world. Failure to achieve an orderly solution of the Negro problem would be—and this Thurgood Marshall feels deeply—much more than defeat for the Negro. It would be a failure at the very core of the American genius—its capacity for constructing forms strong and shrewd enough to withstand the tensions of change. From the nation's start, its three chief resources have been its fabulous mines of law, politics and social (including economic) organization. The abundance of material things —the bales of cotton, bushels of corn, ingots of steel—is a byproduct of these three primary riches, not the take from a geographic roulette wheel or the hoard of materialist greed. Today's drive of the U.S. Negro toward equality is as strong as any social tide in Asia or Africa or Europe. At the centers of those other drives for change stand agitators, conspirators, men of violence. The strength and flexibility of the U.S. Constitution make possible the fact that the man at the vortex of the Negro issue in the U.S. is a constitutional lawyer. The Sore Arm. His is a highly technical calling. The Constitution itself is a complex work of statecraft, put together by some of the most sophisticated political scientists who ever lived. Along with the document there is the constitutional residue of 168 years (this Saturday) of intense legal, political and social history—a coral-like cathedral of precedent, compromise, balance and bold interpretation. It takes scholars to move in this maze—and Thurgood Marshall is a sound, conscientious, imaginative legal scholar, although by no means the best of his day. Technical skill is not all a U.S. constitutional lawyer needs. The job is to apply the Constitution to life, which will not sit still. For example, in the mid-20th century it became a fact of life that millions of U.S. Negroes could not feel themselves clothed in the minimum dignity of men as long as they suffered under certain legal disabilities. And millions of Southern whites, with an intensity perhaps equal to that of the Negroes, resist the change the Negroes feel they must have. A constitutional lawyer involved in this conflict must understand men as well as the legal technicalities through which their raw