A review with brevity (if not wit)
It is a perfect moment for Americans to watch the movie Marshall.
For the first time in decades, large numbers of white people (often those in the mainstream) are openly questioning the fairness and legitimacy of the struggle against racism (and we have seen a President openly support supremacists).
Don’t get me wrong, racism and racists have never gone away, but much of that racism was pushed underground for the last few decades because it was assumed to be socially unacceptable.
Today we are in a moment where:
* Forty-six percent of white Southerners polled said they agree or strongly agree that white people are under attack in the U.S.
* 55% of white people say that they are discriminated against in America today, according to a new NPR/Robert Wood Johnson/Harvard poll.
* As Paul Waldman reported: a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found 52 percent of working class whites saying discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities (though the number was smaller among whites with higher education levels). And last year, Gallup found 43 percent of whites saying discrimination against whites is “widespread” in America.
And this despite:
An income-gap for people of color which is much larger than it is for white people
A Criminal Justice System where people of color still disproportionately suffer mass incarceration and from mass surveillance
And where people of color are the biggest losers in the tax bills passed by the different houses of Congress.
So we have ended up in a strange place. A place where, for many Americans, the real question of Election 2016 was the one about why America had left rural White people behind and not why we were still so racist. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it:
“Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.”
I was born in the year that Jim Crow officially ended (1967) and as a young kid I moved from a very diverse neighborhood in New York City to a very segregated neighborhood in Chattanooga Tennessee.
I was lucky enough to go to a federally funded junior high school and high school in Tulsa Oklahoma that were both designed around diversity models. I have experienced the overwhelming reality of racist mass incarceration and I have seen racist violence up close.
Thurgood Marshall has always been a giant to me.
Marshall and Coalition Building
Marshall is not a full-life biopic about Thurgood Marshall, it is an examination of a particular case he took in 1940’s Connecticut (well in advance of Brown v. Board or his later appointment to the United States Supreme Court).
In addition, Chadwick Boseman isn’t really trying to do an impersonation of Thurgood Marshall as much as he is trying to communicate an idea of who Thurgood Marshall was and what he stood for (a good choice, so many actors get so buried in trying to “be” the character they sometimes lose the plot).
A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of the movie Roman J. Israel Esq.
Roman, the main character in that movie, was a disillusioned civil rights attorney who sells out his principles and ends up regretting it and in the process of facing the consequences of his fall inspiring a cynical and jaded white partner to restart the civil rights struggle anew.
Thurgood Marshall was anything but disillusioned but Marshall is a story, in many ways, about coalition building between the legendary attorney and a reluctant Jewish attorney in Connecticut as they are forced to work together to defend an African-American man against sensationalized charges that he raped a white woman in the 1940’s (the movie is based on a true story).
One welcome difference between Marshall and many other movies covering similar themes is that this is not a movie about how the white person saves the black people it is also not a movie about how black people should help “transform” white people’s racism.
- Marshall is a movie about injustice necessitating all human beings to stand up and fight for what is right.
- Marshall is about Thurgood Marshall struggling to gain footholds and confidence in his legal struggle against white supremacy.
- Marshall is about a Jewish lawyer being forced, by a racist judge, to be the mouthpiece for a much more accomplished and talented criminal lawyer and through that process coming to grips with his own complicity and starting to realize his own place in the struggle (the real Samuel Friedman went on to become a civil rights lawyer too).
- Marshall is about a black man (Joseph Spell) who was arrested and was likely facing life in prison for a crime he did not commit.
- And Marshall is about the human cost that accrues when society creates racist fantasies ginned up to maintain and protect white privilege.
Thurgood Marshall was traveling all over the country as the sole attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in cities and towns where everything he was doing could have gotten him killed.
Thurgood Marshall was literally choosing to walk into what could easily have been a deathtrap every time he walked into a new town (often in the South) and whenever he took on a new case.
Samuel Friedman was choosing to defend a person accused of one of the most sensational crimes in the country at the time. In a sense, he was making himself and his family public enemy number one to the town racists and defenders of the status quo.
Most important, they both realized that they were fighting against the core ugly eugenic truth at the core of White Supremacy (that Blacks were not really people at all).
Many whites felt (and sadly, may still feel) that black people were no more than animals who, when left to their own devices, would always resort to rape and violence (the lack of self-awareness in racist mythmaking is always stunning, white men raped black women with impunity and white men felt they were entitled to treated black man with animalistic violence <often “for their own good”> on a daily basis.
This myth was, not coincidentally, propagated through cinema.
The first true American blockbuster movie was D.W Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation (1915)” and that movie centered on a group of heroic KKK soldiers protecting their town (and white racial purity) from “animalistic” black people who were coming to attack their “womenfolk.”
One of the stories that has stuck with me the most about the Jim Crow era was a passage from Hank Aaron’s book “I Had a Hammer” (a favorite player of mine as a kid). Mr. Aaron shares that if a restaurant would let the black players sit down and eat inside the restaurant (a rare occurrence) that restaurant would then break any dishes black patrons used so that white patrons would never have to eat from the same plates as black players.
Imagine living everyday dealing with that kind of constant denial of your worth as a human being (and that was one of the greatest hitters of all time, imagine what happened to people like the real life Joseph Spell)?
Marshall reminds us that the past is often be prologue. It is hard to hear some of the stuff being said openly by the alt-right without remembering Jim Crow.
By the end of Marshall, you get a good feeling for who Thurgood Marshall and Samuel Friedman were, what they were fighting for, and why it is so important for everyone to stand up in the face of cruelty and injustice. It is well acted, well directed, and well conceived.
And, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the Civil Rights struggle this is an important movie to watch.
Thinking Out Loud
- I want so badly to dismiss Josh Gad (I think it has something to do with Olaf being omnipresent) but, as hard as it is for me to say this, he is really good in Marshall. I apologize for the backhanded complement Mr. Gad, Kudos.
- Sterling K. Brown is also very good as Mr. Spell
- Chadwick Boseman is, as always, very good.
Yes, I did hate 42 but not because of Boseman (the script sanitized Robinson and Rickey to the point where they were both unrecognizable and pandering representations of very complex and important historical characters.
Yes, I wasn’t wild about Get On Up, but Boseman was good as Brown (again my criticism was based on an often boring script which didn’t go far enough in presenting the complexities of Brown or of his music.
I am very much looking forward to his stand-alone Black Panther movie.
- I am willing to have reasoned and evidence-based discussions. Some books that I would recommend would include: “The Color of Law,” “When Affirmative Action Was White,” “The New Jim Crow,” and “American Apartheid.”
- When Marshall first came out Chance the Rapper invited the city of Chicago to at least one free screening (that is pretty cool).
Okay, that is all I have on Marshall.
Josh is a blogger and freelance writer. Please consider following him on Twitter, throwing a tip into his hat on Patreon, show your appreciation using Paypal.me, or adding OnPirateSatellite to your feeds.
Conclusion: Important and Timely: Recommended
