FAYETTEVILLE : O’Connor recalls Marshall in UA speech
Posted on Saturday, October 4, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/239176/
FAYETTEVILLE — Former U. S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recalled Friday how a private confession from a fellow justice years ago got her thinking about how civil rights success is measured.
“The treatment of African-American students at this very university law school was a result of decades of struggles by countless leaders across the country,” O’Connor said as she gave the keynote address Friday afternoon during the dedication of a 64, 000-square-foot expansion to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville School of Law.
“I served for some years on the Supreme Court with one of them: Justice Thurgood Marshall.”
Marshall, who died in January 1993, led NAACP’s legal campaign to end school segregation. As a civil rights attorney, he argued on behalf of student Linda Brown in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., the 1954 U. S. Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation.
“At the end of his days, before he had stepped down as a justice, he told me that he really thought his life had not succeeded in producing the equality he had hoped to achieve for African-Americans,” O’Connor told more than 800 people gathered on Union Mall, the plaza faced by the student union, fine arts department, Mullins Library and the law school. “He didn’t think he had succeeded.
“ When I look around today, I think he succeeded beyond his best hopes. He really did succeed, and produced the change that we see.”
Progress often begins with failure, she said, and movements are both a collective enterprise and a collection of individual efforts.
“Breakthroughs almost always open a new chapter for struggle, even when they close an earlier one,” O’Connor said.
After retiring from the high court, O’Connor became chancellor of The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., in April 2006.
She spoke of how the late Silas Hunt and five other black law students known as the “Six Pioneers” paved the way, and how Dean Cynthia Nance was the Fayetteville campus’ first female dean and Arkansas’ first black law school dean.
In 1948, Hunt had become the first black admitted to the Fayetteville law school, making it the first in the South to admit a black voluntarily, she told the crowd.
“The school’s decision to admit Mr. Hunt is one you can be very proud of,” O’Connor said.
“The Six Pioneers here broke down the race barrier, but it was decades before African-American students generally were treated equally in our nation’s schools,” O’Connor said. “And Brown was a landmark decision that in many ways was only the beginning of legal challenges of guaranteeing racial equality under the law.”
O’Connor said she could relate to the struggles of the Pioneers.
“I know a little bit about being the first to join an esteemed institution,” said O’Connor, who became the first woman to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court. Appointed by then-President Reagan, she took her seat as an associate justice on Sept. 25, 1981.
But that really marked the end of her personal struggle in her chosen profession.
“I got out of law school about the time of these Six Pioneers, in 1952, and only about 3 percent of law students in this country were women in those days. And the job opportunities for women in this country were really few.
“ I could not get an interview at a law firm in California — much less a job offer,” O’Connor said. “I did receive one tentative offer as a legal secretary, if I could type well enough. But I didn’t take that job.”
So, she and another lawyer opened a small private practice in a Phoenix suburb’s shopping center, amid TV repair shops, laundry services and money lenders.
“It was not a high-rent area,” she said to laughter. “I got walkin business. People came into see me about grocery bills they couldn’t collect, landlord-tenant problems and other everyday matters not usually considered by the U. S. Supreme Court.”
O’Connor asked the audience what significance today’s students should place on her experiences as they consider their futures.
“I suggest to you that you will witness your generation’s own movements for social change,” she said. “Indeed, as the story of your Six Pioneers and its historical context demonstrate, in a sense these movements don’t have a beginning or an end.
“ They’re part of our nation’s ongoing effort to secure fundamental liberties for our citizens. If you seek them out, you will have opportunities to help in that endeavor, whether as public servants like Justice Marshall... or as pioneers living lives of example like your Six Pioneers here.”
Because the United States is rooted in the principle of the rule of law, legal change is a “cornerstone of every effort to get fundamental liberties.”
She challenged UA law students to take advantage of the new law school facilities — which include additional classroom, library and office space — and the faculty on campus, and to aspire to practice law in a way that helps everyday Americans seek justice.
“Put them to good use, will you ?” she said in closing.