“The law is a weapon, if you know how to use it.”

That was a motto of Charles Hamilton Houston, the late respected Dean of Howard University’s law school and principal litigator for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during crucial stages of the Civil Rights movement. Houston spoke those words to a young law student named Thurgood Marshall, skillfully portrayed last night at the Kennedy Center‘s Eisenhower Theater by Laurence Fishburne in Thurgood. The solo play is an elegant telling of how that young man ended up in law school, took Prof. Houston’s words to heart, then went on to become a civil rights icon and the first African-American to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.