Thurgood Marshall was not the best choice for the open seat on the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in the fall of 1961. At least that’s what many Southern white attorneys stated when the FBI interviewed them as part of a nationwide investigation for President John F. Kennedy.

It would be two years before civil rights leaders would see Kennedy as an advocate of their cause, but the president pleasantly surprised them with his bold decision to appoint Marshall to the federal bench.

Many of the FBI reports from the South were damning. A report from Richmond, Virginia, quoted a prominent attorney as saying, “If Marshall were a white man, he would never be considered for a judgeship.” The dismissive attorney also described Marshall as a “run of the mill” attorney with “below average” legal abilities, no experience beyond civil rights, and “biased and bigoted in his approach to issues concerning members of his own race.”

Perhaps there was something to this criticism. Marshall, after all, received his legal training not from Harvard, Yale, Chicago or any other fertile ground for future federal judges, but from a school that he considered below average — Howard University School of Law.

Marshall’s legal experience was also very limited. At Howard, he received the education of a lifetime from the rigorous Charles Hamilton Houston, a proponent of using law to advance the cause of civil rights. Marshall became a fervent disciple, and rather than accepting a full ride for a Harvard J.D. following graduation, the young attorney steered his budding career toward a job that would make history — legal counsel for the NAACP.

Marshall won that job in his mid-20s, and for the next quarter-century he built a career that earned him the nickname “Mr. Civil Rights.” As special counsel of the NAACP, and later as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Marshall won landmark Supreme Court cases that desegregated schools from kindergarten to the graduate level, dismantled “the white primary” and invalidated property covenants that prevented African-Americans from owning or occupying real estate in white areas.

The Southern critic was right: Marshall’s experience was limited in focus. But it was limited to the honorable cause of wielding the Constitution, especially the 14th Amendment, as if it were a sword. Marshall’s focus on fighting for civil rights also meant that he did not have judicial experience in 1961.

But Marshall’s critics were also wrong, and there was one among them who knew exactly that — Virginia Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr.

The governor characterized Marshall as “a very capable lawyer; level-headed and highly experienced.” He also said “that as far as deciding matters concerning racial segregation  …  Mr. Marshall as a judge would lean over backwards in order to decide a case strictly on its merits,” and that “many people who might question the qualifications for Mr. Marshall for the judiciary would be highly influenced in their judgments because of Mr. Marshall’s race.” And to top it off, the Southern governor added “that Marshall might place a more liberal interpretation on some matters of law, particularly those dealing with segregation, than many other lawyers would,” but that “Mr. Marshall’s courtroom demeanor and legal talent” would make him “a very fine judge.”

History proved Almond to be a good judge of Marshall’s abilities. Of Marshall’s 98 majority decisions on the Court of Appeals, not one was overturned by the Supreme Court.

The surprising part of all this is not that Almond’s predictions came true, but rather that he dared to make them in his racially charged context. For those of us who are as liberal as Marshall, as the court leans to the right, perhaps the best we can do as we debate the next nominee is to insist not on a Thurgood Marshall but on another rarity — a Gov. Almond. Whether we can find someone like the judicious governor is another question.

— Michael G. Long is the editor of “Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall.”