Thurgood Marshall

Born Thoroughgood Marshall

1908 – 1993

Thurgood Marshall was born July 2, 1908 in Baltimore Maryland, U.S., he was a lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 to 1991. He was the first African-American member of the Supreme Court.

He successfully won the case of Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 which declared prohibited racial segregation in American elementary schools.

He was the son of William Canfield Marshall, a railroad porter and steward at an all-white country club, and Norma Williams Marshall, an elementary school teacher.

In 1930 Marshall graduated with honours from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He was rejected by the University of Maryland Law School because he was not white, so he attended Howard University Law School instead. Receiving his degree in 1933 he ranked first in his class. He was Charles Hamilton Houston’s protege who encouraged him and others to view the law as a tool for social change.

After graduation he began his private practice in Baltimore. Among his first legal victories was the case of Murray v. Pearson in 1935. He sued the University of Maryland for denying an African American admission because of race.

In 1936 Marshall became a staff lawyer under Houston for the NAACP.

In 1938 he became the lead chair for the NAACP, and two years later he became chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Throughout the 1940s and ’50s Marshall became a top lawyer winning 29 out of 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

His other cases included when the court declared unconstitutional a Southern state’s exclusion of African American voters from primary elections, in Smith v. Allwright in 1944, state judicial enforcement of racial “restrictive covenants” in housing, Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, and “separate but equal” facilities for African American professionals and graduate students in state universities, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, both in 1950.

Marshall’s victory case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established his reputation as a formidable, creative legal opponent, and an advocate for social change. Law students today still examine the oral arguments of this case from the courts legal and political perspective.

Marshall argued that segregation in public schools produced unequal education for African-Americans and whites, a strategy to have the court overrule the ’separate but equal’ doctrine from Plessy v Ferguson in 1896.

Marshall relied on psychological, sociological and historical data that sensitized the court to the destructive effects of regulated segregation on the self-image, social worth, and social progress of African American children.

In September 1961, Marshall was nominated by President John F. Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but his confirmation was delayed for several months because of opposition from Southern senators.

Marshall was named U.S. Solicitor general in July 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was nominated to the Supreme Court on June 13, 1967. His appointment was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the U.S. Senate on August 30, 1967.

Marshall steadfastly fought for equality and justice for minorities by the state and federal governments. Being a practical distinguished activist he was committed to making the constitution work. He attempted to fashion a ’sliding scale’ interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause that weighed the objectives of the government against the interests of the affected groups by the law.

Marshall’s sliding scale was never accepted by the Supreme Court, although in several other cases the court echoed his views. He was against capital punishment and favoured the national government’s right over the states rights.

Marshall served on the Supreme Court during a major ideological change. Early in his career he fit comfortably among a liberal majority under Chief Justice Earl Warren. As his allies either retired or died opportunities were created for Republican presidents to sway activism in a conservative direction. When he retired in 1991 he was known as “the Great Dissenter,” one of the last remaining Supreme Court liberal member dominated by a conservative majority.

Thurgood Marshall passed away on January 24, 1993 in Bethesda.