My Marshall Plan

Thurgood Marshall worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover to expel communists from the NAACP - while King's organization was bristling with them, to the immense annoyance of President John F. Kennedy - Marshall redeemed blacks' civil rights the American way: by winning his battles in court. That's how it's supposed to be done in a country of laws.

King's protests had the unfortunate effect of giving violent street agitation a halo. Now every idiot smashing a Starbucks window thinks he's a civil rights champion. But it was Thurgood Marshall, doing it the American way, who changed the world. As Marshall said, civil rights was serious business - and King was "a boy on a man's errand."

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