So might have ended the dreams and aspirations of young Jefferson Beauregard. But referring to a black Assistant U.S. Attorney as “boy” and warning him to “be careful what you say to white folks” isn’t necessarily a political death sentence in Alabama.  In fact, it was just the publicity Jefferson Beauregard needed to get himself elected Attorney General in 1994, and just a few years later, to the U.S. Senate.

From his perch as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jefferson Beauregard will lose this battle of opposing Elena Kagan’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, and the former clerk to Thurgood Marshall, America’s first black Supreme Court Justice, will be confirmed. A country that elected a black president in 2008 is, on the whole, not as riled by race.  But Jeffereson Beauregard can still score points back home with his constituency by broadcasting his message loud and clear for all the South to hear. If he once called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for defending blacks in voting rights cases, what could Jefferson Beauregard be thinking about the New York/Harvard Jew Girl before him who held Thurgood Marshall, “Mr. Civil Rights” in such high esteem?

There can be little doubt where Jefferson Beauregard would have stood in 1967 when Lyndon Baines Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the US Supreme Court.  Jefferson Beauregard would have proudly joined the 11 white southerners who opposed Marshall’s nomination (and anti-lynching bills, and any civil rights legislation that came their way).   He would have joined men like Herman Talmadge, and Strom Thurmond, the architect of the “Southern Manifesto,” which condemned the Brown v. Board of Education decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power.”

Jefferson Beauregard, (who claimed to have no use for groups like the NAACP because “they forced civil rights down the throats of people”) would have been right there with Thurmond and Talmadge, urging the Federal Government to stop interfering with the “Southern way of life.”  They were the men Thurgood Marshall had to fight for decades, from countless, hostile whitewashed courthouses in small towns across the South, to the neoclassical U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC to end legalized segregation in America. The battle exhausted Marshall, who admitted he had sometimes grown weary “trying to save the white man’s soul.”

In 1986, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was shot down by a Republican-controlled judiciary committee that seemed to be acknowledging at the time that there wasn’t much of a place in mainstream American politics for people like him.  But Jefferson Beauregard found some crawl space, and it’s no surprise Americans can still hear the last echoed squeals from the Confederacy.

The first time I saw Stevie Wonder was on Sesame Street and I talked my dad into letting me buy his album, Talking Book.   Watching this clip of Stevie Wonder from 1973 makes me think that somehow at age 11, despite my bad haircuts and my penchant for bell bottoms, I managed to pull my head out of my ass when it came to taste in music.  This is as good as I remember it, too.

Defective: Imperfect in form or function. –Mirriam-Webster Dictionary

The story goes that young Thurgood Marshall, in trouble at school, was sent by the principal down to the basement with a copy of the U.S. Constitution, which he was told to read and memorize.  ”Before I left that school,” Marshall later said, “I knew the whole thing by heart!”  By the age of 16, Marshall claimed to have had the document memorized, and this early exposure to the Constitution fueled Marshall’s desire to become a lawyer.

His father, William was a railroad porter, but he was fascinated by the law. Marshall remembered his father taking him to court to watch trials together in Baltimore.  And in their Baltimore house they would argue law and discuss the codification of slavery that was written into the Constitution.  On that they could agree.  The document, as written, was imperfect, which was why the Founding Fathers provided for an Amendment process.

Unable to attend the University of Maryland Law School because of his race, Marshall went on to graduate magna cum laude from Howard University School of Law in 1933, passed the Maryland Bar that same year, then successfully sued the University of Maryland Law School for refusing to admit blacks.  It was an impressive accomplishment for a lawyer still in his twenties, and one who would go on to win 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yesterday, Michael Steele, Chairman of the RNC criticized President Obama’s choice of Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court (a former Marshall Clerk) for her support of Marshall’s 1987 speech in which he described the Constitution, as originally drafted and conceived, as “defective.”

It’s unclear what Michael Steele was reading when he was a young man.  If it was the U.S. Constitution, it likely did not impact him the way it did a young Thurgood Marshall living in Baltimore.  With all of the advantages made possible by Marshall when he filed suits across the country to permit inspired and emboldened African-Americans (who often risked their lives) to receive the same educational opportunities as white Americans, Steele failed in his attempt to pass the Maryland Bar.

For the rest of the ride, we talked about the only historical person I knew from Senegal–Battling Siki, the former light heavyweight boxing champion in the 1920s.  Georges beamed with excitement.  Battling Siki, (Louis Phal) was promoted as a wild fighter from the jungles of Africa. “A chimpanzee who has been taught to wear gloves.”   (In fact, Siki was raised in the Senegal city of Saint-Louis and moved to France at age 15. “I have never even seen a jungle,” he later said.)   He joined the French Army in World War I and was decorated for bravery.

In 1922, Battling Siki was supposed to take a dive against Georges Carpentier in Paris.  Siki was in for the fix, but early in the fight, Carpentier was pummeling him, even fighting dirty against the African.  Siki became angry and decided to fight back, knocking the champion down and out in the sixth round.  The referee (who may have been in on the fix as well) immediately disqualified Siki for fouling Carpentier, but the three ringside judges, fearful that 50,000 Parisian fans might riot, overruled the ref and awarded the fight to Battling Siki.

(I watched the fight on YouTube and it does appear that the knockout blow from Battling Siki was a vicious knee to Carpentier’s midsection.  No replays in 1922!)

After upsetting the French champion, Battling Siki became the toast of Paris.  In a top hat and tuxedo, he was sometimes spotted walking down the Champs-Elysees with a pet lion on a leash, or firing his revolvers in the air.  He could be seen in nightclubs throughout the city, guzzling champagne and enjoying the exclusive company of white women. (Both his wives were white.)

Unfortunately, Battling Siki’s reign as champion did not last long, and by 1925, he was living in New York and fighting for peanuts.  He’d drink in speakeasies and attempt to skip out on the tab, often taking his brawls out onto the street.  On December 15, 1925, the 28-year old Senegalese was found dead on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen with two bullets in his back.

Georges and I agreed that it was a sad end for such a colorful man.  Once in Harlem, we passed the Thurgood MarshalI Academy on 135th.  I asked Georges if he knew of any good places near Schomburg where I could grab something to eat first.  He told me there was an IHOP nearby, or a very good African place around the corner.   I chose the latter.  Georges said he was hungry, too and when he pulled up, there was a space open and he parked the cab.  So we both went into the Baraka Buffet on Frederick Douglass and had lunch.   I can’t be sure, but I believe I had the “rice and goat,” which I will take every time over the IHOP pancake combo.

The new standards will likely affect content nationwide, as Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks and some publishers use the Texas standards as a template.

Ironically, it was textbooks that brought Thurgood Marshall to Texas more than sixty years ago.  Heman Marion Sweatt was an African American mail carrier in Houston who wanted to become a lawyer, but was denied admission to the University of Texas law school in 1946 on the sole basis of his race.  With the NAACP representing him, Sweatt sued the University of Texas on the grounds that the state had no law school that would admit blacks.

In response to the lawsuit, University of Texas president Theophilus Painter leased the basement of a petroleum building near the state capital, dumped a few boxes of textbooks inside and notified the NAACP that there was now a law school for blacks that was “equal to the University of Texas Law School.”

The court agreed that Sweatt was being denied his right to equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, but balked at ordering that Sweatt be admitted.  Instead, it held the case for six months, giving Texas time to create a more suitable separate law school for blacks at Prairie View University in Houston, which offered college credit for vocational skills such as mattress and broom-making.  Sweatt refused to apply.

Thurgood Marshall arrived in Austin in May of 1947, confident he had just the case to strike a critical blow to legalized segregation. “I think we’ve humored the South long enough,” he said.  Marshall was appalled by the references in the state’s brief to possible violence by “unspecified persons in undesignated places” should a black student be permitted to study law alongside whites.

“We want to remove governmental restriction,” Marshall argued. “If they want to, they can keep their prejudices.”

The Travis County courtroom was crowded with local NAACP members, as well as dozens of white University of Texas law students who had come to see Marshall argue his case that a few textbooks in a basement did not constitute a law school. At one point, bailiffs told the white students not to sit in the black section, and the students replied that they would only move if a black person asked them to move.  After the first recess, blacks and whites sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the packed courtroom and bailiffs gave up trying to prevent mixed seating.

The University of Texas students booed as they heard the Dean of their own law school, Charles McCormick, state under oath that the two law schools were equal.  They booed when he justified segregation as necessary to ensure quality education for whites, and they applauded when Marshall questioned Earl Harrison, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who testified that it was absurd to call an institution with one student a law school.

For his part, Heman Sweatt held up exceedingly well under aggressive questioning on the witness stand, despite a battle with nerves.  Marshall expected as much, especially after he took the mailman out that morning and “filled him full of gin.”

To no one’s surprise, Judge Roy Archer (who laughed out loud in court when shown photographs of the new Texas law school for blacks) ruled against Sweatt, as did the Texas Supreme Court on appeal.  But Thurgood Marshall had the foresight to focus the legal debate not on the obvious physical difference in the facilities, or the lack of textbooks, but on the intangible elements that a “traditional” law school would offer, and the social and psychological disadvantages of learning in a segregated environment.

In essence, Marshall had used this Texas courtroom to set the table for the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark 1896 decision upholding racial segregation. One reporter observing Marshall in Texas wrote, “everyone knows what the score is…and those of us who sit in the crowded courtroom day after day realize that we are watching history being made.”

On April 4, 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Sweatt v. Painter, where Marshall attacked the constitutionality of segregation and argued that education was a foundation of American rights.  Two months later, the Supreme Court handed down their unanimous decision requiring that Sweatt be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. The Court also found that a student’s ability to compete was compromised by being separated from the majority of law students.

After the decision, the New York Times wrote that Plessy was left in “tatters,” and the South braced for the inevitable end of segregation in elementary and secondary schools.  Four years later, Thurgood Marshall did indeed end legalized segregation in public schools with his victory in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Today, the courthouse in Austin where the historic trial that brought together a mailman and a future Supreme Court justice is named the Heman Marion Sweatt Travis County Courthouse.  And those textbooks thrown into the basement of a petroleum building were the seeds for what is today Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law.

Despite the fact that the former Chair and current member of the Texas Board of Education, Don McElroy, a dentist, recommended that textbooks be amended to reflect that the civil rights movement led to “unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes,” there are many Texans who refuse to sit quietly as history is swept under the rug, just as the white University of Texas law students refused to sit amongst themselves more than sixty years ago.

Allen Jaffe, Owner of Preservation Hall, 1965

Doing online historical research takes me to some places that I regret running into because they suck so many hours out of my days.  The New Orleans Public Library’s Louisiana Photograph Collection is one of those places. It has everything from Works Projects Administration images commissioned by FDR’s New Deal agency, to newly digitized personal collections of images taken at the turn of the 20th century. And while it’s true that some great American photographers like Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott and Dorothea Lange cut their teeth taking pictures for the WPA, there’s also an abundance of the mundane in this collection. Pictures of houses, farms, parades, parks, zoos and public projects designed to put people to work during the Depression.

As much as I love stumbling across wonderful, obscure pictures from the past, I’m also fascinated by the ordinary. Sometimes a poorly composed or slightly out of focus image is every bit as interesting to me as the iconic ones because they remind me of flipping though an old family album. The photography may not always be inspiring, but these imperfect snapshots make it so much easier to step back in time if you’re not in constant awe of the photographer’s talent.

In a few weeks I’m heading down to Louisiana to speak at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, and I’m planning to spend a few days in the Crescent City for Mardi Gras.  With that in mind, here’s some of the more interesting pictures I stumbled across in this magnificent, time-sucking collection.

A.P. Tureaud, left

Irish Channel Shotgun Shack

Rex Parade

Mardi Gras, 1901

St. Louis Cemetery

Night School

Horseshoes

Syphilis Drip