‘Woke’ progressives want to cancel former Chief Justice John Marshall

OPINION:

The Newport News School Board has added the John Marshall Early Learning Center to its list of schools being renamed in response to a request from Gov. Ralph Northam in July 2020, encouraging them to remove school names with ties to “individuals who advanced slavery and systemic racism.”

If elected officials learned what students in Virginia and throughout the U.S. discover about John Marshall, they would understand why schools are an ideal place to recognize his lasting contributions.

Throughout America, school students study John Marshall, a Virginian, in their history, civics, government, and social studies classes and learn he is the longest-serving U.S. Chief Justice who led the Supreme Court for 34 years. More importantly, they find that he shaped the Court into what it is today, coequal to the executive and legislative branches and charged with ensuring the American people receive the promise of equal justice under the law.

They learn that Mr. Marshall, like George Washington, was a slaveholder and that his participation in and benefit from slavery blatantly contradicted his view that it was an evil institution. They also find that the slavery-related cases that came before the Court during Mr. Marshall’s tenure as Chief Justice applied the law of the time and didn’t establish broad legal precedent. Today, students are asked to examine these conflicts – these disparate truths – and consider a nation founded on principles of freedom but practicing bondage. 
Students learn that Mr. Marshall died in 1835 but that his judicial legacy lives today, consistently upholding the Court’s authority to interpret the Constitution and the importance of a strong federal government and independent judiciary to our nation’s health. Astute students will see that current justices – from Breyer to Barrett – often name drop Mr. Marshall; Mr. Marshall’s Court citations numbered more than 30 in last year’s term alone. 

Perhaps most importantly, students learn that Marbury v. Madison, Mr. Marshall’s landmark 1803 case, was the first time the Supreme Court ruled an act of congress unconstitutional and established the Court’s right to expound constitutional law and exercise judicial review. 
In a country working toward a more perfect union, Mr. Marshall’s Marbury reigns supreme as a defender of justice.

Landmark decisions ending school segregation, recognizing marriage equality, and those that established the legal equality of women all rest on Marshall’s Marbury and the principle of judicial review. A later Marshall opinion – Fletcher v. Peck – affirmed the Court’s right to strike down state laws, a power that has proved even more significant than the authority to overrule federal ones. The list of modern examples is long but at the top of this student’s is Virginia’s unconstitutional laws prohibiting interracial marriage struck down in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia.

In 1958’s Cooper v. Aaron, the Court said no to Arkansas school officials’ attempt to slow desegregation after 1954’s Brown v Board of Education, noting Mr. Marshall’s majority “declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” — which would become “a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.” As in Brown, Thurgood Marshall argued the case before the Court and won, this time on behalf of a group of African American students between the ages of six and 18 who were being denied their constitutional rights established under Brown. 

We can wish for blameless, more perfect founders, but that’s not our reality. It’s not America’s story. It’s our job to be better, to look behind so we can see our way forward, and to continue the struggle toward a more perfect union. As we do, we are armed with Mr. Marshall’s permanent and indispensable constitutional principle of judicial review, and for that, we should recognize him.

As students explore our nation’s constitutional founding, perhaps they are asked to consider an America without judicial review, an America without a court upholding our nation’s constitutional principles even when it means overruling elected officials. 

Perhaps elected officials should be asked the same question.

• Paul C. Harris is a John Marshall Center for Constitutional History & Civics Board of Directors and Former Member of the Virginia House of Delegates from the 58th District.