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Thurgood Marshall (NAACP)

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When I joined the NAACP, I never could have imagined Thurgood Marshall, the head Special Counsel ("Thurgood Marshall"), would bring me into the biggest case of my career. In my times at Northeastern University Law School, I had written countless papers on the Supreme Court decisions preceding Brown v. Board of Education; and now I would be collaborating with the greatest attorneys the NAACP had to offer.
Representing over 200 plaintiffs from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. (Conaway, Judith 15), the enormity of the case hung over my head as the train inched closer and closer to the city and the NAACP’s New York office. I flipped over my copy of the New York Times, reading the column about the case once more, “Certainly no lawyer, and practically no member of the bench, had Thurgood Marshall’s grasp of the doctrine of law as it affects civil rights” ("Thurgood Marshall"). I disembarked the “whites-only” car and began my walk towards the NAACP National Office. As I sat in the waiting room of the …show more content…

Placed before the most powerful attorneys the Legal Defense Fund had to offer were two dolls, one black and one white. Kenneth Clark, the psychologist used in the lower courts for Boiling v. Sharpe, had used these same dolls to support the detrimental effect of school segregation on children. To prove this, Kenneth Clark asked black children questions relating to the dolls. When asked to identify the “bad” doll, two-thirds (Good, Diane L. 28) of the black participants pointed at the doll matching their skin tone. Yet when asked which doll they relate to the most, the children pointed to the same “bad” doll, emphasizing the effects on children’s self esteem. But today, rather than children viewing the dolls, the attorneys would put themselves in the place of the participants and take part in the

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