Thurgood Marshall subject of new film

With Black History Month beginning here in the UK, a new film chronicling the early career of one of the most important African-Americans in US history, Marshall, offers viewers to witness the rise of the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

While Marshall, is perhaps most remembered for his arguing in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, and later, his 20+ career, as a Supreme Court Justice, his early career is not as well-known. This new film however, starring Black Panther Marvel Comic superhero (Chadwick Boseman), focuses on Marshall in 1941 and his defense of a black man who has been accused of raping a white woman.

The synopsis of the case revolves around a Black chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Sterling K Brown), who after a 16-hour police interrogation reportedly confessed, raping, Eleanor Strubing, of Greenwich, Connecticut, who was found soaked and shivering on the side of a highway, near a reservoir in New York. Spell, however, would tell Marshall and his local co-counsel Samuel Friendman (Josh Gad) that he had admitted to having consensual sex with Strubing in the car, but not rape. Spell faced up to 30 years in prison if convicted, and instead of accepting a plea deal that would have required an admission of guilt, Marshall advises Spell to decline the plea deal and go to trial.

The 1941 rape case in high-society Connecticut offers a glimpse into how racism wasn’t strictly in the Deep South but all over America, and how African-American lawyers like Marshall would face threats and practices of segregation while trying to root out injustice in the American legal system. Daniel Sharfstein, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School who has written about the Spell case, notes that, “The prosecutor is the prosecutor for Greenwich, Connecticut. Yet when he opens his mouth to describe Spell to the jury, he engages in a level of race-baiting that could easily have taken place in Mississippi”. During this time period, of the 455 men executed for rape between 1930 and 1972, 405 were African-American, Marshall had noted in a separate court decision. If it had’nt been for Black lawyers like Marshall, the number could have been even higher. Thurgood Marshall, whose name may not be the first name to be spoken of when listing important African-American leaders as opposed to, Dr. King or Malcolm X, who gained recognition through their oratory skills as a way to root out racial injustice, Marshall stands as a hero in the courtroom, to many civil right lawyers who have looked to him and his career, as a shining example of an individual’s relentless quest to root out injustice and give equal justice under the law to everyone.

Marshall will be released in the US on 4 October 2017 and in the UK on 20 October 2017.