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Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)

Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting powerful merchants. As petitioners litigated their freedom, the colonial state grew in legitimacy and bottom up support. Through petitioning and litigation, the peoples of Luanda and Benguela became active “Portuguese” vassals with rights. Those under the protection of the sovereign state became more than mere commodities while those outside became increasingly more vulnerable. Pervasively and paradoxically, the very consolidation of state legitimacy contributed to the expansion of the slave trade. After years of working in ecclesiastical, municipal, and state archives in Luanda, Rio, and Lisbon, Ferreria offers a major reconceptualization of colonialism and slavery itself. A better title for his book would have been: Petitioning Slaves and the Creation of the South Atlantic Slave Trade.

Angola was no more than these two relatively small ports of few thousand dwellers (moradores), each with strange connections to their hinterlands. Luanda and Benguela were overwhelmingly black and mulatto cities that engaged in formal ceremonies of protection and “transfer” of sovereignty with neighboring natural lords, sobas. The sobas offered labor, porters, and military aid to urban merchants (pumbeiros and sertanejos) and sheriffs (captães mores), the representatives of the Portuguese state, in exchange for a monopoly on the local redistribution of foreign commodities and support against their rivals. Sobas provisioned the trading caravans to the interior (sertões) with porters. The sobas also offered military aid to the cities when neighboring and distant sovereigns, including the Dutch, French, and British, threatened the ports.

This system of Portuguese sovereignty however was rather limited. To the north and south of Luanda and Benguela lay independent polities that for nearly three hundred years remained impervious to all threats of violence and negotiations. The degree of coastal isolation of these two ports was striking. Given the nature of maritime currents, Benguela and Luanda communicated much more easily with merchants in Rio (Brazil) than with one another. For nearly three centuries there were no roads connecting Luanda and Benguela. Like in the north and south, the eastern, interior frontiers of both cities ended where the independent Imbangala kingdoms began. The frontier was dotted with “forts,” or presidios, that were primarily trading centers: Indian cottons, Brazilian cachaça, and gunpowder for slaves. Within these narrow horizontal coastal-eastern corridors, the ports held loose control over the local natural lords, sobas, sworn to vassalage.

Ferreira describes how the expansion of trade within Luanda and Benguela’s subject territories led to the enslaving of vassals. As commodities arrived and credit expanded, so too did pawnship. Debtors would offer family members and subordinates as slaves to merchants. Sobas would also punish civil and criminal cases, particularly witchcraft, with slavery. This system benefitted merchants who did not have to rely on interior trading fairs to obtain chattel from independent kingdoms. Yet, at the same time, the Portuguese crown empowered local judges to set up tribunals to secure the rights of all vassals. Ferreria describes the workings and evolution of the Tribunal de mucanos in detail, offering a mind bending account of bottom up participation through paperwork.

Recently arrived slaves in Brazil, circa 1830 (via Wikipedia)

Mucanos were petitioners who orally pleaded in front of sobas and capitães mores for freedom when wronged. Slowly, oral petitions became written, local custom codified, local decentralized decisions centralized, and corrupted local judges overseen by outside referees. Ferreria describes how the tribunal de mucanos, originally under the control of mercantile interests and self-interested local lords, evolved into a tribunal controlled by bishops (junta das missões). The juntas would have priests as translators-cum-official legal intermediaries (inquiridor das libertades), scribes (escrivão), registries (livro branco), and archives. Priests would become accountants, collecting the royal quinto (20% tax) after having properly ascertained who was rightfully enslaved. In practice, the job of the junta became one of distinguishing between outsiders from the sertòes, who could be enslaved, from the internal vassals who could not. More importantly, after baptizing the properly enslaved, priests would use the body of slaves to document the act of royal authorization and baptism by fire branding chattel. Slaves leaving Angola would carry two other fire marks as notarial documents: the originating and the receiving merchants’. Ferreria also shows that local decisions taken by the local rural tribunals would evolve into a hierarchical system of urban appellate courts, moving petitions from magistrates (ouvidor) to the governor (ouvidor geral) to Lisbon. There were slaves who sent petitions to Lisbon to appeal. Some even appeared in Lisbon in person.

Ferreria shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century the debate over the right to enslave vassals evolved, particularly as the governor Miguel Antonio Mello argued that the same rules to judge the wrongful enslavement of soba vassals should also apply to processes within the sovereign kingdoms of the sertões. All slaves, regardless of their origin, should have the right to appeal. Mello’s good intentions were not to last beyond his time in office. Mello, nevertheless, waived all fees to mucanos in judicial procedures.

In Luanda and Benguela, race was meaningless except as marker of social status, which was signified through clothing. Many petty merchants were slaves-for-hire, retailers (quissongos), moving cachaça, guns, and Indian cottons into the trading fairs (feiras) in the interior sertões while bringing back caravans of slaves. Many settlers (moradores) of the ports were ladinos, that is urban slaves who enjoyed extraordinary freedoms, including often the right to move to Brazil as servants, petitioners, and traders. Merchants and captains were largely exiles and criminals, degredados, from Brazil. Black settlers and ladinos were considered “white,” but so too were the vassals of allied sobas who through trade acquired European shoes: Negros calçados would petition to be exempted from tribute as porters and be treated as “white.” Female slaves who amassed considerable fortunes as market women (quitanderas) also became free “white” settlers. This was a world of both strict social hierarchies and dizzying social mobility.

One of Ferrerira’s most intriguing contributions is to demonstrate the peculiar relation of Brazil and Angola, one that almost entirely excluded the Portuguese. If Angola was a colony, it was Rio’s and Minas Gerais’s. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the expansion of gold mining in Minas led to the growth of Brazilian involvement in Luanda and Benguela. Merchant-pombeiros and sheriffs-capitães mores were often exile-degredados from Brazil. Luanda and Benguela settlers sent their kids to be educated in Rio. Many acquired trades in Brazil and came back as carpenters and tailors. When Brazil declared independence in 1822, the Portuguese remained fearful for several decades of repeated conspiracies to unite Angola to the new Brazilian empire. The case of Angola demonstrates that early modern monarchies were indeed polycentric. The center of gravity often lay in America, not Europe.

This extraordinary, eye-opening book not only illuminates the distinct nature of South Atlantic systems of slavery, connecting Rio to Luanda and Benguela, a system that accounted for at least one third of all the slaves brought to the Americas. It also throws light on the role of slave petitioning in securing legitimacy and political resilience There were extraordinary parallels between the Tribunal de mucanos in Angola and the Republica de indios in Spanish America. In both cases, the state invested heavily in protecting nonwhite vassals from mercantile predation. In doing so, the system grew in legitimacy and longevity. The true paradox of modernity might not be that white freedom was possible because there was black slavery, as Edmund Morgan argued in American Slavery, American Freedom. The true paradox might well be that slavery grew and multiplied precisely because there were tens of thousands of slaves who petitioned and obtained their freedom.

Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States

People celebrate the Obergefell vs Hodges decision in front of the Supreme Court in 2015 (Ted Eytan, via Flickr)

by Alexander Taft

In June 2015, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court of the United States resolved decades of debate by declaring marriage a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision changed the landscape of American marriage law, but what was this landscape in the first place? Two historians of marriage and sexuality in the United States have spent decades taking on that very question. Nancy Cott and George Chauncey have both participated in recent history as expert witnesses, amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief writers, and eminent scholars analyzing marriage and homosexuality. They show us how incorrect we often are when we think of these histories in the United States. These historians have made history a friend to the court as much as any lobbyist or interest group.

Nancy Cott’s Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation lays out centuries of marriage law in the United States. Far from the moral absolute marked by religious teachings that many might assume marriage was, it is a complicated and shifting concept in the history of the Western world. Cott points out that marriage has a national concern that secular governments legislate in order to create the best “civic units” out of the family. Society became concerned with civic character and then tried to improve these norms by engineering a certain type of family. The common practice of unofficial divorce and separation led to a formal legal process for divorces just as much as the legal definition led to formal divorces. We are accustomed to thinking of these everyday things as defined from above, yet our community practices often find their way into law as often as the other way around.

The history of marriage in the United States certainly does not have the kind of unchanging moral character that many opponents to marriage equality claim. “Traditional” families are constantly changing. Two centuries ago, the most important people in deciding a match may well have been the community in which the couple lived. Small rural towns had a deep interest and broad powers in marital arrangements. Cott’s book is full of such examples of unofficial activities that reflected community interests, not the interests of the individuals involved. Marriage today is much more of an individual choice based on one’s own expectations from life, even if still affected by an idea of “normalcy” and pressures to fit into a family, a faith, or some other kind of community. Ultimately, the majority of Americans are free to marry outside of their “tribe,” because whatever social costs that are associated are considerably lower. Similarly, marriage was limited to “consenting” and “free” individuals. This meant that slaves were barred from this institution while also condemned as immoral for engaging in extramarital intercourse; a key aspect of reconstruction was the construction of ex-slave marriage. If marriage is an ever-changing reality, why shouldn’t the court consider homosexuals simply another kind of marriage?

Marriage may be a concept in flux, but what about homosexuality? Today we identify people with their sexual orientation, but was that the case in the past? Many assume that throughout history, these communities were wholly underground — persecuted and kept hidden by families ashamed of their “perverse” siblings. But George Chauncey, along with a wide field of historians, have helped us to reconsider. Rather than being a gay or a lesbian, often individuals engaged in various kinds of sexual behaviors. In fact, Chauncey’s ground-breaking book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, outlined how urban men who participated in homosexual behaviors often considered themselves to be “normal,” that is, not defined by their same-sex intercourse, as long as they played the “active” role in intercourse. Those men engaging in the “passive” role in intercourse were seen from the outside as primarily a public nuisance on par with prostitution (which they often engaged in). The homosexual subculture of turn-of-the-century New York was visible and defined by specific kinds of sexual activities, not necessarily nature-born identities. In fact, the words we use today, such as “gay,” “lesbian,” and likely even “homosexual” would not have been known by the vast majority of people.

Twelve years before Obergefell, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for this legal breakthrough. The June 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, challenged and then overturned what were commonly known as “sodomy laws” that declared sodomy illegal. Much of the debate surrounding these laws considered them to be expressions of long-standing morals; an accepted societal conclusion that homosexuality itself was illegal. However, Chauncey’s amicus curiae brief (with input from a number of historians) decimated this belief by pointing out that “sodomy” itself was a dubious term that had shifted throughout history. He pointed out for example that famed thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas considered every sexual act that was not direct penetrative vaginal sex to be sodomy. He also explained that the history of sexuality shows that these “morals” were recent inventions and historically changeable. His brief was specifically quoted by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, whose opinion overturned decades of legal persecution.

Historians have much to teach, but not only to students. Society is improved by their scholarship, often because our collective memories are too short and our ability to see past our biases and preconceptions is often lacking.

On the “Polish Death Camps” Law

Picture of barbed wire fencing and buildings from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp — (Auschwitz-Birkenau, via Pixabay)

By Natalie Cincotta

Last Thursday, the Polish senate passed a bill that would outlaw public statements that acscribe responsibility or complicity to the Polish nation or state in crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. If signed into law by President Anrzej Duda, who supports the measure, using terms like “Polish Death Camp” would become punishable by fines or jail time up to 3 years. “The point I must stress most emphatically is that there was no complicity in the Holocaust,” explained Duda in a statement, “either on the part of Poland as a state, a non-existent state, or on the part of Poles perceived as a Nation.”

The pending legislation has prompted a diplomatic spat with Israel and is considered an “attempt to rewrite history” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. State Department has also expressed disapproval, citing concerns over the potential strains on Poland’s relationship with the U.S. and Israel, as well as freedom of speech.

Around the same time, state-owned Polish Radio (Polskie Radio) launched an interactive website “aimed at debunking misconceptions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust,” according to a release. The site is available in Polish, English, and German.

Titled “Germandeathcamps.info,” the first section shows a map of the Nazi camp network established across occupied Europe, followed by thematic sections including profiles of German perpetrators, a short timeline of the Final Solution, video footage of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, and oral histories of victims. The last section, titled “distortion of history,” refers to two cases of the usage of “Polish death camps” in the recent past – once by German broadcasting company ZDF and by President Obama in a 2012 speech.

Map featured on germanydeathcamps.info showing Nazi concentration and extermination camps in Europe — Map featured on germanydeathcamps.info

This public history project has a clear political agenda – that is, to show that camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Nazi, not Polish, camps, and thus attest that the Polish state bore no responsibility for complicity in the Holocaust. Opponents agree that the term “Polish death camps” is indeed inaccurate, but worry that the law would silence instances when Poles were culpable in Jewish persecution, whether by aiding local German authorities in rounding up their Jewish neighbors, denunciation, or, in some cases, killing. In a joint statement issued by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, Dariusz Stola and Piotr Wiślicki warned of a chilling effect in difficult discussions of crimes committed on Polish soil, calling for honest and open discussion.

The larger implications of a law banning the suggestion of Polish complicity is much larger than simple phraseology. Distilling the conversation into categories of “collaborator” and “victim” precludes a more difficult public conversation on the wide range of actions, experiences, and responses on part of gentile Poles in relation to the persecution of Jews during the war. Poles were victims of Nazi persecution, as they were also helpers, rescuers, and participants, and their motivations as such were complex and contradictory in ways that defy easy categorization. Two major studies illustrate this complexity.

Book cover of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross

Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors intensified the debate about Polish “complicity” in the Holocaust. Neighbors tells the story of how on one day in July 1941 a group of Polish residents in Jedwabne murdered 1,600 of their Jewish neighbors, about half of the population. According to Gross, it was Poles who did the killing, not the local German gendarmes. At a time when Poland’s national self-image of WWII was, and is, one of victimhood, the revelation of an instance in which Poles had brutally murdered their Jewish neighbors stirred a debate about “complicity” and “collaboration” that, as the proposed law might suggest, has not yet been resolved.

In Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in Occupied Poland, Jan Grabowski recounts the role of Poles in the rounding up and murder of Jews in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a county in southeast Poland. After the ghettoes in the area were liquidated in 1942, Germans relied on local Poles to hunt Jews (referred to as Judenjagd) who had escaped liquidation and hid among the gentile population or in the forest. The Polish Blue Police, the Baudienst, and local Polish peasants played an active role in denouncing Jews, participating in searches, or even killing. Jewish property was often a motivation for participating, as the Germans instituted a reward system. Importantly, there are also many instances of rescue: some Poles hid Jews from the Nazis, and their motivations for doing so varied, sometimes altruistic, sometimes materially-driven. Sometimes, if the hidden Jews were no longer able to compensate their Polish hosts, they were denounced to the local authorities.

The Polish state does not share some kind of equal “co-responsibility” with the Nazis (the state was actually in exile in London), because the Germans were the “undisputed bosses of life and death” in occupied Poland, as Gross argues, and “no sustained organized activity could take place without their consent.” Even if the law emphasizes the role of the Polish state, the law seems to be a pretext to stifle the discussion of the participation of Polish people, as seen in Jedwabne and Dabrowa Tarnowska. As works like Neighbors argue, we must account for the Holocaust both as a system of mass murder and also for its discrete episodes of impromptu violence carried out by local people. It is also important to note that Polish responses, actions, and attitudes are not easily distilled into categories like “collaborator,” “bystander,” or even “victim,” it is possible that individuals can be any or all three of these things to different extents, at different points in time, and for different reasons. Allowing space for honest, evidence-based discussion is vital to this kind of constructive engagement with difficult pasts, which has already been taken on by several Polish scholars and institutions. As these voices in Poland urge, ignorance is best challenged through education, not silence.

Also by Natalie Cincotta on Not Even Past:

Review of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
Review of Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia

Virtual Auschwitz by David Crew
Looking into the Katyn Massacre by Volha Dorman
David Crew reviews The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir: Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

By Luritta DuBois

When Hollywood media websites announced Chadwick Boseman would portray Thurgood Marshall in December 2015, people immediately slammed director Reginald Hudlin’s choice to select an actor who did not share Marshall’s phenotype. Boseman is brown skinned with 4b hair, while Thurgood Marshall was light skinned and had a 3b curl pattern. Those vast differences, the critics held, rendered the movie inauthentic because Thurgood Marshall benefited from light skinned privilege his entire life. Some even thought Boseman’s slender physique made him the wrong choice. I chuckled at that observation knowing that a glance at the movie’s synopsis and a Google image search would have easily cleared up their confusion. All jokes aside, I initially reacted to the news with curiosity and not disdain. I wanted to know whether a filmmaker could truthfully tell Marshall’s story without focusing on how colorism worked in his favor. In order to give a fair response to this question, I examined a variety of materials: a summary of the film; Chadwick Boseman’s interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (air date June 21, 2017), biographies Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams; and the movie Marshall. I decided the scope of the film made such an undertaking possible.

The debate over light skin privilege stems from a practice common in the United States known as colorism, a form of discrimination in which people are treated differently based on the social meanings attached to skin color. This type of behavior is manifested in the preferential treatment given to African Americans who physically approximate whiteness. For example, in the early 20^th century, brown paper bag and blue vein tests constituted an integral part of the application process for some Black institutions and organizations (i.e., universities, sororities, and fraternities) that afforded members opportunities to improve their social-economic situation. The ideal candidate had the following physical features: lighter than or the same color as a brown paper bag and visible veins because of light skin. People censuring Boseman’s casting most harshly argue that the color caste in America enabled Thurgood Marshall to accomplish important milestones like earning a law degree from Howard University, being a successful NAACP litigator (Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he tried before the Supreme Court), and becoming the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

While the complexion critique is valid, one cannot reduce Thurgood Marshall’s life to benefiting from light skin privilege. Devil in the Grove and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary show there were limitations to his color entitlements, the most striking example being Marshall’s attempted lynching in Columbia, Tennessee. In 1946, the NAACP sent Marshall to Columbia to defend two African American men accused of rioting and attempting to murder white law enforcement officers (Zephaniah Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver served as co-counselors). Following their acquittal, an angry group of local whites, including some police officers, apprehended Marshall and his colleagues, but chose to lynch Marshall instead of the dark skinned Looby and Weaver, who was white. Fortunately for the Civil Rights icon, Looby’s protestations and the sound reasoning of a local magistrate stopped Marshall’s execution. This incident was one of many where Marshall’s French Vanilla hue could not protect him from experiencing the racial violence (real and threatened) and discrimination that come with being Black in America.

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (via Library of Congress)

Since Marshall focuses on the areas in Thurgood Marshall’s life where colorism played an insignificant role, casting a dark-skinned actor does not dilute the story. The movie introduces us to Marshall’s personality, provides a glimpse into how he executed his legal genius, and sheds light on the challenges he faced as a Black lawyer. In exploring those aspects of Marshall’s life, the movie’s objective is not to deify him, but to bring him down to earth and capture his essence when he was a young lawyer for the NAACP. The viewer sees this in a story centered on one criminal case he and Connecticut based attorney Samuel Friedman tried in 1941. The previous year, white Greenwich socialite Eleanor Strubing accused her Black American chauffeur and butler, Joseph Spell, of rape. She also claimed he attempted to kill her by throwing her into the Kensico Reservoir. The NAACP took on the case not only to ensure an innocent man received a fair trial, but also to protect other African American domestic workers in Connecticut. After Strubing’s allegations, the NAACP heard rumors of Northern white families firing their servants because they feared the presence of a sexual predator in their home. Given that domestic labor was the main source of income for African Americans in Connecticut, the NAACP felt compelled to prove Spell’s innocence. Lastly, high profile criminal cases expanded the organization’s membership and increased funding, which the NAACP needed in the early 1940s.

Although Marshall, like all Hollywood films based on historical events, took a few liberties, the Associated Press noted that the movie was, for the most part, faithful to the facts. This is especially true when it comes to the film’s depiction of Thurgood Marshall’s character, his skills as a litigator, and the hardships he endured. Gilbert King and Juan Williams describe him as folksy, charming, and always laughing. Looking at Marshall’s fondness for joking, King recounts a time when, after a legal victory, he opened a bottle of whiskey in the NAACP’s headquarters and amused his co-workers with impersonations of judges, opposing counsel, and dimwitted “uncle Tom” witnesses. In the movie, he is unpretentious and alluring in his interactions with everyone from the Connecticut Black family who hosted him to a woman he met in a local bar. Screenwriters Michael Koskoff and Jacob Koskoff (father and son) and director Reginald Hudlin also showcase Marshall’s comical side in the scenes where Sam Friedman picks him up from the Bridgeport train station and when both approached an angry group of whites in front of the courthouse. At the train station, Marshall asked Friedman to carry his luggage. Upon picking them up, the latter inquired if the suitcases contained cement because of their weight. Marshall, whose back is facing Friedman, answers “guns” with a devilish smile. He quickly ended the prank and assured his co-counselor that the luggage only had law books. Once the trial started, a mob who supported Mrs. Strubing greeted Marshall and Friedman, who was Jewish, with posters that had racist caricatures of them. Marshall walks up to a person holding a sign, turns to Friedman with a smirk and replies, “that doesn’t look anything like me, does it?”

Thurgood Marshall and other members of the N.A.A.C.P. legal defense team who worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case (via The New York Public Library)

Even though Marshall has light hearted moments, Hudlin and the Koskoffs balance the comedy with serious events. As a result, Marshall does not come across as a jester, but a layered man who could simultaneously joke about racism and use his legal expertise to diligently seek justice for wrongly accused Black Americans. The jury selection scene stands out in illuminating this quality about him. Friedman wanted to dismiss a woman because he felt the juror’s southern roots and gender made her biased towards Mrs. Strubing. Marshall, however, viewed those characteristics as unimportant. Instead he carefully examined the juror’s body language during her interview and noticed she reacted unpleasantly to Lorin Willis, the head prosecutor, but gave non-verbal signals that showed she valued Friedman’s opinions. Eventually, Marshall convinced his co-counselor to keep her and the decision boded well for them. Overall, the movie shows that it was Marshall’s keen observations of the evidence (depositions and the physical landscape where Spell allegedly tried to kill Strubing) that planted seeds of doubt in the minds of the all-white jury. You not only see the future Supreme Court Justice’s talents at work, but also an incredible amount of charisma.

Lastly, the film portrays the violence Marshall endured as a Black man on a Civil Rights crusade. In one of the opening scenes, a gang of white men fired gunshots to intimidate him as he left Hugo, Oklahoma after trying a sensational case. Later on during the Spell trial, two white men who sympathized with Eleanor Strubing assaulted him at a bar he visited to relax following a taxing day.

U.S. Supreme Court, 1976 (via Library of Congress)

Despite the effort that went into attending to the facts, Marshall is less than perfect. The main weaknesses are the underdevelopment of Marshall’s relationship with his first wife Vivian “Buster” Burey (Marshall became a widower in 1955 when she died from cancer) and the cursory glance given to Marshall’s performance in the courtroom. The viewer learns Buster had multiple miscarriages and Thurgood’s legal work kept him away from her for long periods. Since the movie aims to humanize Marshall, it could have benefited from more attention to how he and Buster coped with their fertility problems. Moreover, an in-depth depiction of Marshall’s struggle to reconcile his demanding job with his responsibilities as a husband would have given the audience a better understanding of the man behind the myth. Hudlin and the Koskoffs could have resolved the film’s second shortcoming by extending the scene where he represents W.D. Lyons, a black man coerced, through torture, into confessing he murdered a white family in Hugo, Oklahoma. In the movie, Sam Friedman talks during the Spell trial because the judge gagged Marshall. Although we see Marshall masterfully coordinate the defense’s strategy, the movie does not thoroughly show how he excelled at cross examining witnesses and presenting evidence to the jury. This was a missed opportunity: during Lyons’ case, Marshall’s skills as a trial lawyer were so great that local whites developed sympathy for the defendant and found exculpatory information for the NAACP’s lead attorney.

With all its flaws, Marshall is worth seeing. Chadwick Boseman deftly captures the spirit of Thurgood Marshall described in Gilbert King and Juan William’s biographies. Furthermore, actors Josh Gad and Sterling K. Brown give strong performances as Sam Friedman and Joseph Spell. In addition to being an enjoyable, well-acted legal drama, Marshall has value because it peels back the mythic veil surrounding Thurgood Marshall and gives viewers an introduction to the man. For those interested in Marshall’s life beyond his most noteworthy achievements, Brown v. Board of Education and becoming the first African American Supreme Court Justice, I recommend Marshall, Devil in the Grove, and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.

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