Thurgood: A Screening and Discussion with Elizabeth Garrett, Rebecca Brown and Dorothy W. Nelson

Visions and Voices

• Date:
  Wednesday, December 31, 1969
  
• Time:
  3:30 PM
• Campus:
  University Park Campus
• Venue:
  Annenberg Auditorium (ASC)
• Cost:
  Admission is free.
  
  Reception to follow.
  
  The University Club will offer a prix-fixe dinner prior to this event. For information and to make reservations, click here.
• Email:
  visionsandvoices@usc.edu

Summary:

Provost Elizabeth Garrett, USC law professor Rebecca Brown and Judge Dorothy W. Nelson will discuss their interactions with late civil rights great and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Following the discussion, the film Thurgood, starring Laurence Fishburne in an Emmy-nominated performance, will be screened.

Description:

The late civil rights great and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was the court's first African American justice. As a lawyer, Marshall tried the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, successfully challenging the unconstitutional segregation of black and white students in public schools.

A discussion will feature USC Provost Elizabeth Garrett; the USC Gould School of Law’s Newton Professor of Constitutional Law, Rebecca Brown; and Judge Dorothy W. Nelson, the first woman law professor at USC Law, the first woman to be a dean of a major American law school and now a senior judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals. Both Professor Brown and Provost Garrett had the honor of clerking with Justice Marshall. The conversation will explore Marshall's life and work and the panelists' interactions with him.

Following the discussion, the film Thurgood will be screened. Filmed in front of a live audience at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C., Thurgood was written by Academy Award and Emmy Award winner George Stevens, Jr., and stars Laurence Fishburne in an Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Award–nominated performance. The compelling present-tense narration revisits the turning points in Marshall’s life and career as he remembers them. Recalling childhood stories of his family and home in Baltimore and his college days in North Carolina as an aspiring lawyer, Marshall recollects his triumphs over adversity to pursue a successful career in the judicial system fighting for human rights. 

Organized by the USC School of Dramatic Arts and the USC Gould School of Law.