He Warned Us. We Forgot.

Heaven sent grit, not saints

I was ready to skip tonight. Get some sleep, old man. My fingers were raw from typing. My eyes felt like sandpaper. I opened one last tab and there he was. Thurgood Marshall on the cover of Jet. August 24, 1967. Staring through that magazine cover like he caught me trying to sneak out of class. That look said, I’m tired too. Sit down anyway.

Maybe it’s the ancestors tapping the radiator. Maybe it’s just me, drunk on sleep deprivation. Or maybe it’s those black-and-white photos inside that issue. Cities on fire that look like the edges of our family albums. Either way, the cover wouldn’t let me go. So pull up a chair, just you and me. We’re going to talk about the night the country looked at a Black lawyer’s face and said, this might still be a nation of laws.

Late August ’67. Your kitchen radio was doing what radios used to do. It gave you church and gossip and the news. In that same week Marvin and Tammi floated across the air with a line that felt like a benediction. Heaven must have sent you.

The single hit the world within forty-eight hours of that Jet date, and Motown was in its preacher bag. The record is simple on paper and devastating in the heart: two voices sharing one vow, a bassline walking slow like a couple arm-in-arm, strings lifting right when the lyric says lift. Call and response. Church without a building fund. It is not just romance. It’s a theory of government disguised as a love song: show up for me and I will breathe again.

Open the magazine and you see what showing up looked like. You see a government that is messy and still trying. You see a man who won a Supreme Court seat with calm that had teeth. “Despite hostile quizzing by Southern lawmakers, Marshall refuses to lose his cool.” That was the line. Cool didn’t mean passive. Cool meant you are not going to make me break character while we decide what the law means for millions of people.

Flip the page and you can hear Lyndon Johnson stage-whisper his own prayer. “I want to introduce to you the new Supreme Court justice—Thurgood Marshall. I hope I’m not premature.” A president using his mic to lean the room toward justice. Not perfect. Still power. Then you hit the pages that always get misfiled in the memory box. Congress hiding behind procedure while cities burn.

“Will take months to resolve wording of simplest bill.” “How Congress fiddles as cities burn.” Bulletproof glass for House members while regular folks had plywood and hope. The point wasn’t that the times were calm. The point was that the chaos triggered public hearings, votes, and money. Federal curiosity wasn’t a think piece. It was a phone ringing in an office that had staff.

The receipts inside that single issue are a syllabus. “Say crisis in ghettos more urgent than Vietnam.” That wasn’t Twitter. That was the Congressional Record talking like the house next door was on fire. Then Jet pulls you into the survey pages and asks the country straight up. What caused the riots. What will prevent the next one. Imagine Washington asking our people to write back with answers and promising to print them. That’s not romantic. That’s accountability.

You want more. Here it is. “More than 75 per cent of Negro children in the South are still being denied rights guaranteed by the Supreme Court.” A sentence like a throat punch. The country had a ruling. The country lacked teeth. The next page proves teeth matter. “Licenses of 3 Chicago real estate firms suspended for practicing discrimination.” Not a hashtag. A suspension. People moved because regulators did their job. Then the wage story tells you why anger doesn’t evaporate just because you passed a bill. “White unskilled workers paid more than Negroes,” even when the qualifications favored the Negro workers. That’s not a mystery. That’s policy.

Even the soundscape is in debate. “Cool it” programs on Black radio. WAOK in Atlanta throwing street dances in trouble spots. WVKO in Columbus saying the “cool it” talk keeps violence top of mind. WCIN in Cincinnati trying the middle lane. Media sets the temperature. Not neutral. Never was.

And inside the Ticker you see the other war, the one nobody puts on the poster. Negro members of a combat unit complaining about unchecked racial incidents in Vietnam. A Ku Klux Klan cross burned by a barracks. The empire exports everything. Including bigotry. If you don’t confront it, it ships next day.

Then Whitney Young steps up and tells the truth clean. When a white man commits a mass murder we call him a sick man. When a few Negroes act out, the whole Negro community gets condemned. That’s the algorithm before the algorithm. That’s why Marshall had to sit there like granite and do constitutional math while men asked if he could be fair to whites.

Here’s the part that will bother you if you’re awake. In that same issue you see federal gears turning everywhere. “May name Negro to top post in D.C.” Riot commissions staffing up. A new Watts bus line getting people to work and easing tensions. Governors saying the quiet part loud, like Iowa’s Harold Hughes: sometimes you need corrective discrimination to offset 100 years of the other kind. The country did not love us. The country at least picked up the phone.

And look at Marshall himself. Let’s say the quiet parts out loud. He carried privileges plenty of brothers didn’t. Light skin in a dark-skin world that punished shade. Howard and Lincoln degrees. A CV that opened doors. He could have cashed in, shut up, played golf. Instead he turned those passes into a battering ram for the least of these. NAACP briefs that tore Jim Crow’s hinges off. Clients who had nothing but a name and a county line. When he finally got to the Court, he didn’t get rich. Jet would later note he was the poorest member of the Court. He wore that like armor. He used prestige to redistribute dignity. Not to go yacht shopping. He was exhausted and he stayed anyway.

Now, let’s do the hard contrast, because history is petty and it keeps receipts. Marshall’s heir by seat is Clarence Thomas, and I wish this paragraph didn’t have to exist. Thomas writes in his memoir that Yale stained him with the stigma of affirmative action. He put a sticker on his diploma to show his disgust. Fine. Pain is real. But watch what he did with it. Instead of using that Yale key to open doors for the kids who got told no ten thousand times, he welded his trauma into a locksmith kit and dead-bolted the next generation out. Over and over his opinions tell a story that sounds like revenge dressed up as doctrine. Not equal justice. Payback.

And in the background, the lifestyle. Decades of luxury trips and favors from billionaire friends, reported out in painful detail. Real talk, you do not need a law degree to understand how that looks to people standing in eviction court. It looks like a justice who traded the choir loft for the owner’s box. Tell me that doesn’t read like billionaire sugar daddies keeping the cushions warm. I don’t care how you spin it, that shit corrodes faith. You cannot preach originalism from a private jet and expect the pews to nod along.

Back to the record, because the record is how we keep our balance. “Every day there’s something new.” In ’67 the newsstand really did hand you something new. Bills. Surveys. Staff hires. Long meetings that turned into votes. The song’s arrangement teaches the lesson. The bass stays steady, the drums soft-step, the strings arrive sparingly. You earn the lift. “Heaven must have sent you.” On paper it’s romantic. Underneath it’s Marshall walking into a hearing and refusing to blink. Heaven is not a cloud. Heaven is a Court seat and the power to make equal protection mean something on Tuesday morning. “To find a love like ours is rare these days.” The rare part wasn’t Black love. We always had that. The rare part was the state taking Black grievance seriously enough to act.

Listen to the bridge. “I look in the mirror, and I’m glad to see, laughter in the eyes where tears used to be.” Policy is the mirror. When it reflects you, your face changes. That’s what Brown did in classrooms and what fair-housing enforcement did on moving day and what voting rights did at the registrar’s desk. “You taught me the meaning of givin’.” Giving is not sentiment. Giving is jurisdiction, budgets, votes, teeth. The Funk Brothers play it like they know the difference. There’s a gospel in those chord changes. Grace is free, but strings cost money.

Real talk, mid-scroll. This piece will cost me 7 subs for telling you what Jet and the charts already told us. If 7 walk, I need 8 to pull up. Be number 8 if this archive matters. Paid subscribers keep the lights on.

$80 a year or $8 a month.:

Now fold in the echo from the future…1984. Marshall, older and worn, still on the bench, said the quiet part plain: when the Court blesses violations and calls them remedies, it “erodes faith in the law of those who rely on the law’s protection” and leaves a “hollow remedy.” He wasn’t workshopping a line; he was performing an autopsy on Equal Protection.

Look around today: a Court tossing precedent like confetti, carving kingly immunity, kneecapping voting and civil-rights safeguards, smashing reproductive autonomy, and telling regulators to sit down while guns and gerrymanders run the block. That’s the invitational. Each ruling whispers to the powerful, the rules are optional. Fascism doesn’t need a parade; it just needs a docket. Drain meaning from the law and you don’t get order….you get street physics. People test the edges because the center is bullshit. That’s lawlessness in a robe.

And here’s why the Thomas contrast matters beyond gossip. When a justice radiates resentment and takes gifts like they’re a sacrament, the message to the kid in the courthouse lobby is simple. The game is rigged, so stop believing in refs. That is a bomb under the court system. You can argue doctrine all you want. If the people stop believing the law belongs to them, they will stay home on jury duty and stop calling witnesses and take justice private. That is when a nation gets very dark, very fast. We do not have to agree on policy to agree on this: legitimacy is oxygen. You cannot snort it on Thursday and breathe clean on Friday.

So what do we do with the cover on the table. We read it as an instruction manual. Marshall had privileges, yes, and he leveraged all of them downward. That is the standard. Use your light skin, your degrees, your access, your boring meetings, your commas, your plane tickets, your donor lists, your microphone, for the people who cannot get through the door without you. If your resume ends with you on a dock waving from a yacht, you did the job wrong. If your resume ends with you the poorest person in the room because you spent it all on briefs and travel and late nights at a kitchen table with families who had nothing but names and county lines, you did it right.

Let’s land with the song expanded, because it’s the only honest landing. That final vamp, “Oh, heaven must have sent you,” rides the chord until your chest loosens. The genius is not the lyric. The genius is the repetition. It is the sound of someone convincing themselves that help is real. In ’67, help felt procedural. Summonses. Committees. A president who said the quiet part into a hot mic and waited for the votes. The music says keep saying it until the body believes it. The law says keep writing it until the country cannot ignore it.

I’m not romanticizing the pain. The issue you’re holding is full of funerals, arrests, and parents staring at burned-out corners. Detroit’s morgues backed up. Chicago teachers quitting. You can smell the smoke on the page. I’m saying the government hadn’t ghosted us yet. It was messy. It was slow. It was also public. When Congress dragged, Jet called it fiddling. When agencies cared, Jet printed phone numbers and told readers where to write. That matters. Because in a democracy, embarrassment is a policy tool. Ask any senator who remembers those headlines.

So was ’67 a better time to be Black in America. In some brutal ways, yes. Because the state still worried about our faith in its project. Because a president stood in a room and said, I want you to meet your next Justice even before the vote. Because regulators pulled licenses. Because a magazine asked the country for solutions and promised to publish the answers. Because the cover on the table showed a Black man’s face and made it normal to put him in the highest courtroom in the land. It was chaotic as hell, but the phone still worked when we dialed.

I keep seeing that line float over the magazine. Heaven must have sent you. Not as a love song. As a memo. Heaven sent you a worker. A man who would win cases for the NAACP, take his beatings in committee, and sit on that bench like a lighthouse in a storm he knew wasn’t over. He wasn’t a saint. He was proof. And if we want proof again, we will have to demand a Court that stops playing rich man’s roulette and remembers who the law is for. We will have to pick up the phone until it rings off the hook. We will have to be annoying. We will have to be loud. We will have to be loving and mean it.

If this took you back to your uncle’s kitchen with the radio low, or to a DC street where your aunt said, that’s our man, baby, help keep it from disappearing again. Be number 8. Annual $80 for the long fight, or $8 today. Free trial if you’re new. Join:

Loop A closes here. Heaven must have sent you. Loop B closes too. The shoebox on my table is full of Jet clippings that smell like ink and smoke. I’m still tired. My eyes still burn. But I’m looking back at Thurgood through that glass. He looks like every exhausted Black elder who kept the lights on one more night. I will sit down anyway. I will keep the files open. And I will not let the law become a hollow remedy on my watch.