The Politics of Being First

After four exhausting days of testimony, Sonia Sotomayor finally exhaled. Thursday night, she retreated to the home of a former law clerk in Alexandria, Va., where, surrounded by friends and family, she let others, for the most part, do the talking. Thomas Butler, a paper-handler foreman for The New York Times, met Sotomayor and his future wife, Margarite, when both girls were juniors at Cardinal Spellman High School. Sotomayor's friends, he observed, were doing what they had always done: gathering around her to quietly lend their support. Butler, whose oldest son and namesake is Sotomayor's godchild, had brought his family to Washington to stand with her during this joyful yet tense and grueling week. And like many others across America, Butler struggled to put her ascension into context. "I don't think we'll see as much history in the next decade as we have seen this past year. And it's all positive," he said.

It's impossible to know, of course, how much history the decade has yet to unveil. But what is clear is that Sotomayor's hearings marked yet another important milestone in the modern evolution of the United States. Sotomayor was only the third person of color and the third woman to face a confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. And she was the first person to be both—a fact not lost on the multitude (upwards of 2,000 people, according to Senate Judiciary chair Patrick Leahy) that crowded into the hearing room during her four days of testimony.

Like any Supreme Court confirmation hearing, this most recent one was an occasion for reflecting on the big issues facing the court. But because Sotomayor would be America's first Latina justice, it was also a time for taking stock of how far the country has come since Thurgood Marshall appeared before the committee seeking to become America's first black justice.

In virtually every respect, Sotomayor's questioners were very different from the ones who faced Marshall. That committee's sole remaining member, Edward Kennedy, left the panel at the end of last year. And it is not just the committee's membership that has changed. When Marshall testified, in July 1967, America's cities were in flames. The day before his hearings began, riots had broken out in Newark, N.J. In the three years preceding his appearance, America had grown accustomed to violent eruptions in its black communities. And as Northern cities burned, the old lions of the South fought the desegregation that the Supreme Court had told them was coming.

James Eastland, a Mississippi cotton farmer and avowed white supremacist, was one of those old lions. He was also the chair of the Judiciary Committee. And he was joined on that body by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John McClellan of Arkansas.

To those Southern senators, Marshall was not just an accomplished black lawyer but an enemy. As director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he had led the fight for school desegregation—a battle that, in the eyes of many Southerners, threatened to destroy the Southern way of life. Marshall had left the NAACP in 1961 to become an appeals-court judge (sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where Sotomayor would serve several decades later); he had left that court in 1965 to become solicitor general under Lyndon B. Johnson, who nominated Marshall to the high court.