NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

When Thurgood Marshall arrived at the Capitol for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on a July day in 1967, the 58-year-old lawyer was the most celebrated legal advocate in the civil rights movement. He had braved death threats and successfully argued more than two dozen cases before the Supreme Court, including decisions that ensured Black voters could cast primary ballots in Texas and ended government-mandated segregation in public schools.

But that wealth of experience and proof of surpassing talent did not stop Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina, from treating Marshall like a none-too-bright schoolboy, as he quizzed the judge for an hour with more than 60 arcane historical and legal questions dating from events in the 19th century.

Who drafted the 13th Amendment? What was the name of the committee that reviewed the 14th Amendment in 1866, and who were its members? What was the objection to the first section of its original draft? Thurmond's barrage of "gotchas" felt never-ending.

"I don't know, sir," Marshall replied again and again, as the senator pressed on.

The esoteric probing was Thurmond's way of hinting that "Marshall wasn't intellectually up to the job," said Harvard Law School professor Mark Victor Tushnet, who clerked for Marshall and has written two books on him.

Whisper campaigns grow as President Biden nears choice for Supreme Court

It was a strategy some other segregationist senators also deployed against Marshall at the time. And it's one that, more than a half a century later, the first Black woman to be named to the Supreme Court may well face, too -- though, likely, in an updated form. Thurmond's unabashed racism has given way to something subtler, but no less insidious: The claim that a justice nominated in part because of his or her race is presumptively less qualified, that the bar must have been lowered.

Tweet   @brothersjudd