Black History Month Celebration Features Author Wil Haygood

Winston’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee and Black Lawyers Network (BLN) affinity group were pleased to present a Black History Month celebration on February 20 featuring Wil Haygood, author of the critically acclaimed book Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America. BLN Co-Chair welcomed firm members and alumni who attended this event, which was broadcast in all U.S. offices, and Director of Diversity & Inclusion Sylvia James summarized Haygood’s many accomplishments as a writer and journalist.

Showdown documents the real-life events surrounding the heated appointment and confirmation of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Haygood had the rapt attention of the Winston audience as he highlighted key events that called him to tell this important story, and the unlikely people who ensured there was a story to be told. He said he dedicated Showdown to his mother, imagining her bending over his bassinet and saying, “in this year of 1954, freedom has come,” when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate public schools. Thurgood Marshall argued this case as chief counsel for the NAACP. “Time has proven that Marshall has been one of the greatest legal minds of the 21^stcentury,” he said.

Haygood recounted his astonishing discovery in the archives of Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan, one of the Judiciary Committee members who oversaw Marshall’s confirmation hearings. It was a letter written in 1967 by a 19-year-old constituent named Barbara Ross, who implored the senator to “open up your heart…and let Mr. Marshall’s record speak for itself.” She predicted that “one of these days the president of the United States will be a negro.” Barbara Ross never received a response from the senator, but her letter was included in Showdown.  

During the program, Haygood also talked about the integral role of President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fierce proponent of integrating the Supreme Court, in getting Marshall nominated and confirmed despite the fact that there were no vacancies on the Court at that time. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also played an unlikely role in Marshall’s story, protecting him from threats in exchange for information about members of the KKK. Haygood vividly described an incident in which Hoover provided Marshall with an FBI escort to ensure he was allowed to get on a plane back to New York. “If they ever make a movie of Showdown,” said Haygood, “I want to write that scene with Marshall floating in the air and the music swelling.” Of note, his Washington Post story, “A Butler Well Served by This Election,” was the basis for Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

Haygood closed by reading a favorite excerpt from Showdown about Marshall’s burial in Arlington National cemetery, land once owned by a confederate family that was sold to the government after the civil war and housed many freed slaves arriving in Washington with no place to stay. “These former plantation residents would be placed in the same ground where Thurgood Marshall, who had worked to free their descendants, would be laid to rest years later, allowing the wind to blow eternally over the gathered and quiet souls.”