Thurgood Marshall’s Equality Speech—as his untitled address came to be known—was delivered on November 18, 1978, at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., at a convocation honoring Wiley A. Branton, its new dean. An associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and a 1933 graduate of the school, Marshall had come to Howard to praise his old friend and partner in the fight to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, some two decades earlier. In addition, he would celebrate the Howard law school’s legacy: its trained corps of African American lawyers who, at great personal risk, went into the American South in the second third of the twentieth century to change the racially segregated world that Jim Crow laws had produced and reinforced since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.