Marshall Urges Blacks to Press Equality Battle

Justice Thurgood Marshall said Wednesday that blacks may be losing the battle for equality and warned a gathering of black judges and lawyers that racism is “broader and stronger than before.”

During a rare public appearance at the annual meeting of the National Bar Assn., Marshall exhorted blacks to continue to work for a common goal of eliminating racism in the United States.

“I don’t care about the Constitution alone or the Declaration of Independence or all the books together,” said Marshall, the first black to sit on the Supreme Court. “What is important is a goal toward which you’re moving--a goal that is the basis of true democracy above the law.

‘Exactly the Same Rights’

“That goal is that a Negro child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi--born to the dumbest, poorest sharecropper--by merely drawing its first breath in the democracy has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States.

“It’s not true. It never will be true. But I challenge anybody to say it’s not a goal worth working for.”

Marshall, 80, who was nominated to the nation’s highest court in 1967, told the legal association: “A recent survey shows that racism is broader and stronger than before. We’re not gaining ground, friends. We might be losing.”

The justice sprinkled his brief speech with jokes and anecdotes to underscore his point that racism will persist until whites and blacks can live together unaware of race.