It isn’t just Republican senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are attacking Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP attorney and American hero whose brilliant long-term litigation strategy led to Brown v. Board of Education, the end of Jim Crow, and eventually to a seat on the Supreme Court. In fact, if they and their compatriots had their way, the next generation might not even know who Thurgood Marshall was. As our affiliate PFAW Foundation has reported, Justice Marshall just barely survived the recent ideological purge of Texas textbooks, despite urgings from Religious Right “advisors” that he be erased from history.

What we’re seeing at the Kagan hearings is just part of a larger far right campaign to vilify a man who symbolized the best of America.