Former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. delivered an inaugural speech in a lecture series made to honor the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in a newly built community center located in the justice’s childhood neighborhood.

Holder, the first Black man to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, spoke Wednesday to various lawyers, judges and endowment contributors about advancing civil rights and social justice efforts at a former elementary school, P.S. 103, that is now the Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center.

In the spirit of celebrating Marshall, who successfully argued in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional, Holder said it was important to understand how he is still relevant in the year 2024.

“He’s a man who really had a significant role in bringing this nation to where it is, but I think his work is unfinished,” Holder said, adding that a restored site where Marshall received his early education made for the right backdrop to urge legal professionals to recommit to his legacy.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

Located in Old West Baltimore, one of the city’s earliest Black middle-class neighborhoods and home to several activists who shaped the Civil Rights Movement, the $14 million center renovation was completed in July, joining several restoration projects in the national historic district.

Resident leaders such as George McMechen, one of Baltimore’s first Black lawyers, Lillie Carroll Jackson, a longtime president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, and Clarence Mitchell Jr., the former chief lobbyist for the NAACP who pushed for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, also lived in or around the neighborhood.

Read More

Tours highlight civil rights legacy in Upton’s Marble Hill

“We’re at a place that formed Thurgood Marshall — seems to me that this is a good place to come and to remind people ... that progress can be made, that we can get to the place that’s consistent with our founding documents, if we do the work as he did,” Holder added.

After a closed reception, Holder said one of the best parts of the event was his interactions with young students from area law schools.

“As young as they are, as committed as they are, to listen to the questions that they had, the comments that they made, that makes me optimistic about where this nation is going,” Holder said. “And as I told them, it is young people have always been at the forefront of the great social changes in this nation, whether it was abolition, the right of women to get the right to vote, the Civil Rights Movement always led by young people, and I wanted to make sure that they understood that their youth is not impediment to them being effective agents for social change.”

Speakers and guests included Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel emerita of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Mary J. Miller, chair of The Justice Thurgood Marshall Lecture Organizing Committee; and retired Baltimore Circuit Judge Andre M. Davis. Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and others were also present.