CLAIM: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men.”
VERDICT: FALSE. Justice Thurgood Marshall, a black man, served on the court from 1967 until 1991.
Schumer took to the floor of the Senate on Thursday to praise President Joe Biden for committing, in advance, to nominating a black woman to fill the vacancy being created by the imminent retirement of liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
In his remarks, Schumer referred to the fact that only two justices in the Supreme Court have been African American — a reference to current Justice Clarence Thomas, and presumably to Marshall as well. Yet he omitted Marshall later.
