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In Amistad, Steven Spielberg's recounting of a slave revolt aboard a ship and of the subsequent trial in American courts, who played Associate Justice Joseph Story?
Harry A. Blackmun, retired Supreme Court Justice. (Source: IMdB.com.) Blackmun during his years on the Court frequently dissented in death penalty cases on the grounds that, in his view, capital punishment constituted cruel and unusual punishment. He dissented in Bowers v. Hardwick, the case in which the Court upheld Georgia's sodomy laws. And most notably (this month, anyway), he authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade , an act which caused him to receive numerous death threats and over 60,000 pieces of hate mail over the years. He insisted on reading all of them. (Biography.com)
Harry A. Blackmun, retired Supreme Court Justice. (Source: IMdB.com.) Blackmun during his years on the Court frequently dissented in death penalty cases on the grounds that, in his view, capital punishment constituted cruel and unusual punishment. He dissented in Bowers v. Hardwick, the case in which the Court upheld Georgia's sodomy laws. And most notably (this month, anyway), he authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade , an act which caused him to receive numerous death threats and over 60,000 pieces of hate mail over the years. He insisted on reading all of them. (Biography.com)
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A year or two ago, there was a Saturday morning cartoon called Static Shock, about a black high school kid who got electrical-based superpowers. It was based on the DC Comics "Milestone" imprint from the Eighties, a bunch of comics set in "Dakota City", featuring largely black and minority superheroes.
One of the other superheroes, Milestone's equivalent to Superman, was "Icon". The idea of Icon was, what if Clark Kent was black, and raised by slaves in the south? Being immortal and all, Augustus Freeman grew up as a slave, fought on the side of the North in the Civil War, and kept faking his own death and coming back as his own son. In the comics, Freeman was a weathy conservative black lawyer, a fundamentally decent guy who felt that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and who was challenged by a street kid who pointed out that "It's a lot easier to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can fly."
As it turns out, Justice Clarence Thomas was a huge fan of the character.
My daydream was that Justice Thomas would voice the character on the TV show. . . they had established that Augustus Freeman existed in the universe. . .
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Sorry. Discussing Clarence Thomas makes my political snarkiness glands head into overdrive.