Marshall, Thurgood

Marshall, Thurgood (1908–1993), civil rights lawyer, first African American Supreme Court justice, architect of the attack on legally mandated racial segregation that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).Raised in Baltimore, Thurgood Marshall graduated from Howard University Law School where he was one of a group of talented students who adopted the vision of their mentor, Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, of law as a form of social engineering. After working with Houston on the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1936 to 1939, Marshall succeeded him as the NAACP's chief lawyer.

After World War II, Marshall coordinated legal challenges to segregated university education, which led to Supreme Court decisions in 1950 requiring the desegregation of graduate education in Oklahoma and Texas. Marshall himself acted as the chief trial lawyer in the South Carolina school desegregation case that was decided along with Brown. Among the other Supreme Court cases Marshall argued and won was a 1948 challenge to legal restrictions on the ability of African Americans to purchase homes in white neighborhoods.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy gave Marshall a recess appointment to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, where he served until 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson then named Marshall solicitor general, and in 1967 appointed him to the Supreme Court, commenting that it was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man, and the right place.”

As a justice, Marshall's major contribution to constitutional law was his formulation of a test for determining whether a state law violated the Constitution's requirement of “equal protection of the laws.” According to Marshall, courts should balance the public purposes promoted by a statute and the burden it imposed on particular group against the characteristics of the group affected, including its ability to achieve its goals through legislation, and the nature of the rights affected, including whether society deemed these rights to be important, even if not constitutionally protected (San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 1973).

During his years on the Court, Marshall insisted that the poor and dispossessed were as fully protected by the Constitution as any other group. As the Court turned more conservative, Marshall found himself increasingly in dissent. By the time he retired in 1991, his achievements as a civil rights lawyer and a Supreme Court justice had earned him a distinguished place in American jurisprudence.
See also Civil Rights Legislation; Civil Rights Movement; Segregation, Racial.

Bibliography

Mark Tushnet , Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961, 1994.
Mark Tushnet , Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961–1991, 1997.

Mark Tushnet