In one of the oral history interviews with Justice Blackmun conducted by Yale Law School Professor Harold Hongju Koh, a former Blackmun law clerk, Blackmun reminisced about his introduction to the court as an associate justice:
"The first time I joined everybody in my robe must have been the ninth day of June 1970, when I came down and was sworn in. I remember walking into the conference room, and there were these eight black-robed figures standing around with names like Hugo Lafayette Black, and William Orville Douglas, and William James Brennan Jr., and John Marshall Harlan and all the rest. Names that any law student, or any lawyer in those days knew well, knew about. Made me wonder what I was doing there. They were very kind at the time and made me feel welcome."
Members of the Supreme Court rarely subject themselves to exhaustive
interviews. But from July 1994 through December 1995, Justice Blackmun
allowed himself to be interviewed for more than 30 hours by Koh.
In the first
of 38 tapes, Blackmun tells Koh how he enjoys looking out his
Supreme Court office window as he reads the sports pages and how
"I can look outside and see who is picketing us."
Highlights
of the Blackmun Papers include a Jan. 16, 1973, note from Blackmun
to Justice Potter Stewart discussing when the abortion cases Roe
v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton would be publicly announced. The bottom
of the note also contains a comment from Stewart.
Of the more than 128 million items in the Library of Congress,
more than 57 million of those are manuscripts, far exceeding the
some 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million
recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps and 5 million
music items. Many of these manuscripts are online in the American
Memory Web site. Click on the "Collection Finder" link at the
upper right of the page and then click on "Manuscripts" in the shaded
column on the right. You will see that 45 American Memory presentations
contain manuscript material.
These include the "African-American
Odyssey," "The
Leonard Bernstein Collection," "The
Frederick Douglass Papers," "Woody
Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song," "Hispano
Music and Culture," "Slave
Narratives" and "The
Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers."
There's even a presentation celebrating the centennial in 1999
of the Manuscript Division, called "Words
and Deeds in American History."