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The Unbearable Tokenism Of Joe Biden
July 7th, 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson places a private call to Thurgood Marshall, then a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and asks him to serve as Solicitor General in the Justice Department. Johnson is candid about his reasons for picking Marshall:
I want you to do it for two or three reasons. One, I want the top lawyer in the United States representing me before the Supreme Court to be a Negro and to be a damn good lawyer that’s done it before. That’s — so you have those peculiar qualifications.
Number two, I think it will do a lot for our image abroad and at home, too, that this is the man that the whole government has to look to, to decide whether it prosecutes a case, or whether it goes up with a case, or whether it doesn’t, and so on, and so forth.
Number three, I want you to have the experience and be in the picture. I’m not discussing anything else, and I don’t want to make any other commitments, and I don’t want to imply or bribe or mislead you, but I want you to have the training and the experience of being there day after day for the next few weeks, anyway. Or maybe the next few months if you could do it.
The “anything else” that Johnson alluded to was Marshall’s eventual nomination to be the first African American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. But when Johnson made the nomination two years later, despite the enormous significance of the announcement, he explained his motivations far more simply:
He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.
On February 25th, 2022, Joe Biden announced his decision to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, fulfilling a campaign promise that he would only consider black females for the next vacancy.
Jackson will be the first black female Supreme Court justice in the court’s 233-year history. In fact, no black woman has even been nominated for the role before. The Supreme Court was comprised entirely of men for 192 years and has seen a grand total of five female justices and two black justices since its…
