Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993

Supreme Court justice

Raised in Prosperous Home

Joined NAACP Staff

Helped End School Segregation

Named to Supreme Court

Liberal Voice in Changing Court

Selected writings

Sources

United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall built a distinguished career fighting for the cause of civil rights and equal opportunity. Ebony dubbed Marshall “the most important Black man of this century—a man who rose higher than any Black person before him and who has had more effect on Black lives than any other person, Black or White.” The first African-American to serve on the Supreme Court, Marshall stood alone as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience toward the end of his career, the last impassioned spokesman for a left-wing view on such causes as affirmative action, abolishment of the death penalty, and due process. His retirement in 1991 left the Court in the hands of more conservative justices.

Duke University professor John Hope Franklin told Ebony: “If you study the history of Marshall’s career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand that when he speaks, he is not speaking just for Black Americans but for Americans of all times. He reminds us constantly of the great promise this country has made of equality, and he reminds us that it has not been fulfilled. Through his life he has been a great watchdog, insisting that this nation live up to the Constitution.”

Raised in Prosperous Home

Marshall’s work on behalf of civil rights spanned five-and-a-half decades and included the history-making Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that led to integration of the nation’s public schools in 1954. As an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Marshall fought to have blacks admitted to then-segregated state universities, challenged the armed services to offer equal treatment for black recruits, and even assured that blacks would have the right to serve on a jury. John Hope Franklin put it this way: “For Black people he holds special significance because it was Thurgood hellip; and a few others who told us we could get justice through interpretation of the law…. Marshall was at the head of these lawyers who told us to hold fast because they were going to get the law on our side. And they did.”

Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, into modest but prosperous circumstances.

At a Glance…

Born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, MD; died on January 24, 1993, in Washington, DC; son of William C. (a club steward) and Norma A. (a school teacher) Marshall; married Vivian Burey, 1929 (died, 1955); married Cecilia A. Suyat, 1955; children: (second marriage) Thurgood, Jr., John William. Education; Lincoln University, BA, 1930; Howard University Law School, LLB, 1933. Politics: Democratic.

Career: Admitted to the Maryland Bar, 1933; private law practice, Baltimore, 1933-38; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Assistant Special Counsel, 1936-38; NAACP, Special Counsel, 1938-50; NAACP, director of legal defense and education fund, 1940-46; 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, judge, 1961-65; Solicitor General for the United States of America, 1965-67; United States Supreme Court justice, 1967-91.

Memberships: American Bar Association; National Bar Association; Civil Liberties Union; Masonic Order.

Awards: Spingarn Medal from NAACP, 1946; Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, Horatio Alger Award; numerous honorary doctorate degrees.

His mother worked as a teacher in a segregated public elementary school, and his father was a steward at the staunchly all-white Gibson Island yacht club. Marshall’s first name derives from a great-grandfather, Thorough-good Marshall, who was brought to America from the Congo as a slave. Both of Thurgood Marshall’s grandfathers owned grocery stores. The judge told Ebony that he rarely felt uncomfortable about his race while growing up in Baltimore. He lived in a nice home on Druid Hill Avenue and played with children of both races. He described himself as a “mediocre” student and a “cutup,” whose punishment was often to read the United States Constitution out loud. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew it by heart.

In September of 1925, Marshall became a student at Lincoln University, near Philadelphia. He originally intended to study medicine and dentistry, but he changed to the humanities and began to consider a career in law. Williams notes that in college Marshall still was something of a cutup—“he was thrown out of the college twice for fraternity pranks.” During his junior year, however, he married a student from the University of Pennsylvania, Vivian Burey.

Joined NAACP Staff

The relationship settled him down, and he graduated cum laude from Lincoln in 1930. From there he moved to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he enrolled in the small, all-black law school. The course supervisor was Charles H. Houston, a demanding but inspiring instructor who instilled in his students a burning desire to change segregated society. Marshall graduated first in his class, earning his LLB in 1933. He was admitted to the Maryland Bar the same year.

Returning to Baltimore, Marshall began working as a private practice lawyer. Williams noted, however, that the young lawyer “still made time for the fight against segregation. Representing the local NAACP, he negotiated with White store owners who sold to Blacks but would not hire them.” Marshall also took the case of a would-be law student who wanted to attend the all-white University of Maryland law school. The case against the university was Marshall’s first big one. His former professor came to town to help him argue it, and the judge gave them a favorable ruling. Soon thereafter, Marshall was invited to join the NAACP’s national office in New York City as an assistant special counsel. Two years later, in 1938, he became the head special counsel for the powerful organization.

“For the next 20 years,” Williams wrote, “[Marshall] traveled the country using the Constitution to force state and federal courts to protect the rights of Black Americans. The work was dangerous, and Marshall frequently wondered if he might not end up dead or in the same jail holding those he was trying to defend.” Marshall prepared cases against the University of Missouri and the University of Texas on behalf of black students. He petitioned the governor of Texas when a black was excluded from jury duty. During and after World War II, he was an outspoken opponent of the government detention of Japanese Americans, and in 1951 he investigated unfair court-martial practices aimed at blacks in the military in Korea and Japan. William H. Hastie, of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, told the New York Times: “Certainly no lawyer, and practically no member of the bench has Thurgood Marshall’s grasp of the doctrine of law as it affects civil rights.”

Helped End School Segregation

The limelight found Marshall in 1954, when he led the legal team that challenged public school segregation in the courts. The case advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark ruling that ended a half-century of segregated schooling. Remembering those days when he worked on Brown vs. Board of Education, Marshall told Ebony that the Court’s decision “probably did more than anything else to awaken the Negro from his apathy to demanding his right to equality.” At the time, however, Marshall was an opponent of civil disobedience for blacks in the South, feeling that organized opposition might lead to white violence—as indeed it did.

Marshall’s first wife died after a long illness in 1955. A year later, he married Cecilia Suyat, a secretary at the NAACP’s New York office. The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling had made Marshall a national figure—he was known for some time as “Mr. Civil Rights”—and when Democrats took control of the White House, the ambitious attorney let it be known that he wanted a judgeship.

Eventually, after much opposition from Southern senators and even from Robert Kennedy, Marshall was named to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. As the civil rights movement gained ground in the 1960s, so did Marshall. In 1965 he was given the post of United States solicitor general, a position in which he represented the government before the Supreme Court. His most important case during these years was the one leading to the adoption of the Miranda rule, which requires policemen to inform suspects of their rights.

Named to Supreme Court

Against stiff opposition even in his own (Democratic) party, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. Marshall’s nomination was opposed most violently by four Southern senators on the Judiciary Committee, but nevertheless he was confirmed by a vote of 69 to 11. He was sworn in and took his seat on October 2, 1967, and he stayed until his failing health forced him to retire in 1991. Williams wrote: “Throughout his time on the court, Marshall has remained a strong advocate of individual rights…. He has remained a conscience on the bench, never wavering in his devotion to ending discrimination.”

Marshall was known as the most tart-tongued member of the court. He was never reticent with his opinions, especially on matters affecting the civil rights agenda. Former justice William Brennan, long Marshall’s liberal ally on the court, told Ebony: “The only time Thurgood may make people uncomfortable, and perhaps it’s when they should be made uncomfortable, is when he’ll take off in a given … is another expression of racism.”

It came as no surprise therefore that judge Marshall was a vocal critic of both Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Few justices have been known to speak out on political matters, and for years Marshall himself refused to grant interviews. Near the end of his service to the Court, however, Marshall did speak out when he was stung by court reversals on minority set-aside programs and affirmative action. In 1987 Marshall dismissed Reagan as “the bottom” in terms of his commitment to black Americans. He later told Ebony: “I wouldn’t do the job of dogcatcher for Ronald Reagan.” Marshall later heaped equal vitriol on the Bush administration after the president vetoed an important civil rights bill. The justice told Newsweek that the actions of Bush and Reagan reflect a return to the days “when we [blacks] really didn’t have a chance.”

Liberal Voice in Changing Court

During the more than a decade that Republicans controlled the White House, one by one, retiring judges were replaced with more conservative successors. For many years Marshall and Brennan teamed as the high court’s true liberals, and Marshall was gravely disappointed when his colleague was forced to retire. Marshall remained the lone outspoken liberal on the nine-member court, suffering through heart attacks, pneumonia, blood clots, and glaucoma. Marshall steadfastly refused to consider stepping down before absolutely necessary because, as he told Ebony, “I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.” One of Marshall’s law clerks told People magazine that Marshall felt compelled to remain on the court, perhaps at the expense of his health, because he saw himself as the champion of the underdog. “He’s the conscience of the Court,” the clerk said. Despite his predictions, Marshall’s failing health finally impeded his ability to perform his duties. He retired in 1991 and died of heart failure on January 24, 1993.

Marshall lived with his wife near Washington, D.C., until his death in 1993. Marshalls’ oldest son, Thurgood, Jr. is an attorney on Senator Edward Kennedy’s Judiciary Committee staff. The younger son, John, is a Virginia state policeman.

Marshall will be well remembered. Marshall served as a strong leader during the civil rights movement, as an architect of the legal strategy that ended racial segregation, and as the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist referred to the words inscribed above the front entrance to the Supreme Court—“Equal Justice for AH”—stating in his eulogy that, “Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall.”

Selected writings

Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences, Mark V. Tushnet, ed., Lawrence Hill Books, 2001.

Supreme Justice: Speeches and Writings, J. Clay Smith, Jr., ed., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Sources

Books

Ball, Howard, Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America, Crown, 1998.

Gibson, Karen Bush, Thurgood Marshall, Bridgestone, 2002.

Williams, Juan, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, Time, 1998.

Periodicals

Ebony, May 1990.

Newsweek, September 21, 1987; August 6, 1990.

New York Times, November 23, 1946; April 6, 1951; January 25, 1993.

People, July 7, 1986.

—Mark Kram and Sara Pendergast

Thurgood Marshall 1908—

Former Supreme Court justice

At a Glance…

Planned to Study Medicine

Joined NAACP Staff

Helped End School Segregation

Named to Supreme Court

Last Liberal on Changing Court

Sources

Former United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall built a distinguished career fighting for the cause of civil rights and equal opportunity. Ebony contributor Juan Williams called Marshall “the most important Black man of this century—a man who rose higher than any Black person before him and who has had more effect on Black lives than any other person, Black or White.” Prior to his retirement in June of 1991, Marshall stood alone as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience, the last impassioned spokesman for a left-wing view on such causes as affirmative action, abolishment of the death penalty, and due process.

Duke University professor John Hope Franklin told Ebony: “If you study the history of Marshall’s career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand that when he speaks, he is not speaking just for Black Americans but for Americans of all times. He reminds us constantly of the great promise this country has made of equality, and he reminds us that it has not been fulfilled. Through his life he has been a great watchdog, insisting that this nation live up to the Constitution.”

Marshall’s work on behalf of civil rights spanned five and a half decades and included the history-making Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that led to integration of the nation’s public schools in 1954. As an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Marshall fought to have blacks admitted to segregated state universities, challenged the armed services to offer equal treatment for black recruits, and even assured that blacks would have the right to serve on a jury. John Hope Franklin put it this way: “For Black people he holds special significance because it was Thurgood… and a few others who told us we could get justice through interpretation of the law…. Marshall was at the head of these lawyers who told us to hold fast because they were going to get the law on our side. And they did.”

Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908, into modest but prosperous circumstances. His mother worked as a teacher in a segregated public elementary school, and his father was a steward at the staunchly all-white Gibson Island Yacht Club. Marshall’s first name derives from a great-grandfather, Thoroughgood Marshall, who was brought to America from the Congo as a slave. Both

At a Glance…

Born July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, MD; son of William C. (a club steward) and Norma A. (a school teacher) Marshall; married Vivian Burey, 1929 (died, 1955); married Cecilia A. Suyat, 1955; children: (second marriage) Thurgood, Jr., John William. Education: Lincoln University, B.A., 1930; Howard University Law School, LL.B., 1933.

Admitted to the Maryland Bar, 1933; practiced law privately in Baltimore, 1933-38; Assistant Special Counsel to National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1936-38; Special Counsel to the NAACP, 1938-50, and director of legal defense and education fund, 1940-61. Named judge, 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, 1961-65; Solicitor-General for the United States of America, 1965-67; United States Supreme Court justice, 1967-91.

Awards: Spingarn Medal from NAACP, 1946; recipient of Horatio Alger Award from Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Numerous honorary degrees.

Member: American Bar Association, National Bar Association, Civil Liberties Union, and the Masonic Order.

of Thurgood Marshall’s grandfathers owned grocery stores. Marshall told Ebony that he rarely felt uncomfortable about his race while growing up in Baltimore. He lived in a nice home on Druid Hill Avenue and played with children of both races. He describes himself as a “mediocre” student and a “cutup,” whose punishment was often to read the United States Constitution out loud. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew it by heart.

Planned to Study Medicine

In September of 1925, Marshall became a student at Lincoln University, near Philadelphia. He originally intended to study medicine and dentistry, but he changed to the humanities and began to consider a career in law. Williams noted that in college Marshall still was something of a cutup—“he was thrown out of the college twice for fraternity pranks.“During his junior year, however, he married a student from the University of Pennsylvania, Vivian Burey.

The relationship settled him down, and he graduated cum laude from Lincoln in 1930. From there he moved to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he enrolled in the small, all-black law school. The course supervisor was Charles H. Houston, a demanding but inspiring instructor who instilled in his students a burning desire to change segregated society. Marshall graduated first in his class, earning his LL.B. in 1933. He was admitted to the Maryland Bar the same year.

Joined NAACP Staff

Returning to Baltimore, Marshall began working as a private practice lawyer. Williams noted, however, that the young lawyer “still made time for the fight against segregation. Representing the local NAACP, he negotiated with White store owners who sold to Blacks but would not hire them.” Marshall also took the case of a would-be law student who wanted to attend the all-white University of Maryland law school. The case against the university was Marshall“s first big one. His former professor came to town to help him argue it, and the judge gave them a favorable ruling. Soon thereafter, Marshall was invited to join the NAACP”s national office in New York City as an assistant special counsel. Two years later, in 1938, he became the head special counsel for the powerful organization.

“For the next 20 years,” Williams wrote, “[Marshall] traveled the country using the Constitution to force state and federal courts to protect the rights of Black Americans. The work was dangerous, and Marshall frequently wondered if he might not end up dead or in the same jail holding those he was trying to defend.” Marshall prepared cases against the University of Missouri and the University of Texas on behalf of black students. He petitioned the governor of Texas when a black was excluded from jury duty. During and after the Second World War, he was an outspoken opponent of the government detention of Japanese Americans, and in 1951 he investigated unfair court-martial practices aimed at blacks in the military in Korea and Japan. William H. Hastie, of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, told the New York Times: “Certainly no lawyer, and practically no member of the bench has Thurgood Marshall’s grasp of the doctrine of law as it affects civil rights.”

Helped End School Segregation

The limelight found Marshall in 1954, when he led the legal team that challenged public school segregation in the courts. The case advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark ruling that ended a half-century of segregated schooling. Remembering those days when he worked on Brown vs. Board of Education, Marshall told Ebony that the Court’s decision “probably did more than anything else to awaken the Negro from his apathy to demanding his right to equality.” At the time, however, Marshall was an opponent of civil disobedience for blacks in the South, feeling that organized opposition might lead to white violence—as indeed it did.

Marshall’s first wife died after a long illness in 1955. A year later, he married Cecilia Suyat, a secretary at the NAACP’s New York office. The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling had made Marshall a national figure— he was known for some time as “Mr. Civil Rights”—and when Democrats took control of the White House, the ambitious attorney let it be known that he wanted a judgeship.

Eventually, after much opposition from Southern senators and even from Robert Kennedy, Marshall was named to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. As the Civil Rights Movement gained ground in the 1960s, so did Marshall. In 1965 he was given the post of United States Solicitor General, a position in which he represented the government before the Supreme Court. His most important case during these years was the one leading to the adoption of the Miranda rule, which requires the police to inform suspects of their rights.

Named to Supreme Court

Against stiff opposition even in his own (Democratic) party, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. Marshall’s nomination was opposed most violently by four Southern senators on the Judiciary Committee, but nevertheless he was confirmed by a vote of 69 to 11. He was sworn in and took his seat on October 2, 1967. Williams wrote: “Throughout his time on the court, Marshall has remained a strong advocate of individual rights. … He has remained a conscience on the bench, never wavering in his devotion to ending discrimination.”

Marshall was known as the most tart-tongued member of the court and was never reticent with his opinions, especially on matters affecting the civil rights agenda. Former justice William Brennan, long Marshall’s liberal ally on the court, told Ebony: “The only time Thurgood may make people uncomfortable, and perhaps it’s when they should be made uncomfortable, is when he’ll take off in a given case that he thinks… is another expression of racism.”

It is therefore no surprise that Marshall was a vocal critic of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Few justices have been known to speak out on political matters, and for years Marshall himself refused to grant interviews. In the years just prior to his retirement, however, Marshall was stung by court reversals on minority set-aside programs and affirmative action. In 1987 Marshall dismissed Reagan as “the bottom” in terms of his commitment to black Americans. He later told Ebony: “I wouldn’t do the job of dogcatcher for Ronald Reagan.” In 1990 Marshall heaped equal vitriol on the Bush administration after the president vetoed an important civil rights bill. He told Newsweek that the actions of Bush and Reagan reflected a return to the days “when we [blacks] really didn’t have a chance.”

Last Liberal on Changing Court

More than a decade has passed since a Democrat sat in the White House, and inevitably this has brought changes to the nation’s Supreme Court. One by one, retiring justices have been replaced with more conservative successors. For many years Marshall and Brennan teamed as the high court’s true liberals, and Marshall was gravely disappointed when his colleague retired. Marshall was the last outspoken liberal on the nine-member court, and had long voiced his determination to hold his seat despite heart attacks, pneumonia, blood clots, and glaucoma. “I have a lifetime appointment,” Marshall told Ebony in 1990, “and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.”

One of Marshall’s law clerks told People magazine that Marshall felt compelled to remain on the Court, perhaps at the expense of his health, because he saw himself as the champion of the underdog. “He’s the conscience of the Court,” the clerk said, “and he’s happy in that role.” But on June 27, 1991, Marshall announced his retirement from the high court, citing his advancing age and medical condition as reasons for stepping down.

Marshall and his wife live near Washington, D.C. Their oldest son, Thurgood, Jr. is an attorney on Senator Edward Kennedy’s Judiciary Committee staff. The younger son, John, is a Virginia state policeman. The Marshalls also have several grandchildren. In his spare time the Justice enjoys spending a few days gambling in Atlantic City.

Sources

Ebony, May 1990.

Detroit Free Press, June 28, 1991.

Detroit News, June 28, 1991.

Newsweek, September 21, 1987; August 6, 1990.

New York Times, November 23, 1946; April 6, 1951.

People, July 7, 1986.

—Mark Kram

Marshall, Thurgood 1908-1993

EDUCATION AND LAW PRACTICE

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In 1967 Thurgood Marshall, who was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908, became the first African American appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Marshall’s twenty-four-year tenure as a justice was marked by a strong interest in protecting the rights of criminal defendants (e.g., protection against illegal search and seizure) and opposition to the death penalty (Furman v. Georgia, 1972). Marshall’s appointment to the Court was part of a successful career as an advocate for the protection of civil rights. Marshall dedicated his career to enhancing access to every arena of public life, with a particular focus on education, housing, employment, and voting. He believed that promoting equal rights under the law was essential to the proper functioning of democracy. According to Marshall, “equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place” (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). Marshall’s dedication created a lasting legacy that encompasses numerous aspects of American jurisprudence. He died in Bethesda, Maryland, on January 24, 1993.

EDUCATION AND LAW PRACTICE

Thurgood (born Thoroughgood) Marshall developed an early interest in education. A cum laude graduate of Lincoln University, he believed that education is the only assured means of promoting both individual and communal success. To Marshall and his contemporaries, education was a necessary means of reshaping the status of American race relations.

After graduating from Lincoln, Marshall enrolled in Howard University Law School, where he met and worked with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston. As dean of Howard’s law school Houston inculcated in his students a commitment to equal justice and a desire to challenge both legal and extralegal segregation. Paramount to that commitment was an emphasis on overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. That decision was significant because it created a legal doctrine known as separate but equal and provided the legal justification for segregation in many areas, including education and public accommodations. Marshall was influenced deeply by Houston’s belief that he and other Howard graduates could force the United States to live up to its promise of equality for all Americans. Marshall graduated from Howard in 1933 and opened up a practice in Baltimore that focused on civil rights cases involving issues such as police brutality, civil disobedience, and housing discrimination. Marshall later assisted the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its civil rights efforts.

In 1935 Marshall won his first major desegregation case, Murray v. Pearson. Together with his cocounsel, Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall represented the African American student Donald Gaines Murray, who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School on the basis of its separate but equal admissions policy. Although Murray was a graduate of Amherst College with an impressive academic record, the state of Maryland defended his exclusion, arguing that black students could attend other schools. Marshall had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School for the same reason five years earlier. In ruling against the state of Maryland the court of appeals argued that constitutional compliance could not be left to the will of the state. Marshall helped secure the first state-level victory toward overturning Plessy.

Murray became the first in a long line of successes for Marshall. As legal counsel for the NAACP he launched a comprehensive assault on the legally sanctioned practice of exclusion. In 1940 he won his first Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida. Over the course of his career Marshall argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court; winning twenty-nine, making him the most successful attorney to argue before the Court. As the U.S. solicitor general, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, Marshall won fourteen of nineteen cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

Marshall successfully argued the 1944 case Smith v. Allwright. The case was significant because it overturned the “white primaries” that were prominent in the South. Marshall helped reduce the gap between the principle and practice of democracy by opening up the political process to all Americans. He continued to attack the separate but equal doctrine in cases such as Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) that struck down racially restrictive covenants. In two cases in particular, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), he fought against segregation in public education. Sweatt found that the state of Texas’s creation of a separate law school for black students (now Texas Southern University) with inadequate facilities failed to meet the standard of substantive equality.

Although Marshall was successful in arguing the cases, he faced criticism from some black leaders who feared that his legal victories would jeopardize state funding for historically black colleges and universities. Marshall responded to the criticism by stating that “we are convinced that it is impossible to have equality in a segregated system, no matter how elaborate we build the Jim Crow citadel and no matter whether we label it the ‘Black University of Texas,’ ‘The Negro University of Texas,’ ‘Prairie View Institute,’ or a more fitting title, ‘An Apology to Negroes for Denying them Their Constitutional Rights to Attend the University of Texas’” (Sweatt v. Painter, 1947).

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

The 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas was the culmination of Marshall’s attack on the separate but equal doctrine. Unlike the prior cases Brown specifically outlawed racial segregation in American primary and secondary schools. Timing was critical for Marshall’s agenda. Armed with his success in integrating institutions of higher education, Marshall and his NAACP colleagues sponsored five cases affirming their view that separate educational facilities were inherently inferior. Led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court reached a 9–0 decision affirming that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). Although Brown did not result in the immediate desegregation of American public schools (see Brown II [1955], Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg Board of Education [1971], and Milliken v. Bradley [1974]), it created a firm foundation for judicial support of the civil rights movement and its efforts to integrate all areas of public and private life.

Marshall’s commitment to protecting the rights and freedoms of individuals was not restricted to the United States. He investigated allegations of racism in the U.S. armed forces in Japan and South Korea and later assisted in drafting the constitution of Ghana. Thurgood Marshall fundamentally redefined the relationship between citizens and their government by promoting equal rights under the law.

SEE ALSO Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 ; Brown v. Board of Education, 1955 ; Civil Liberties; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Desegregation; Education, USA; Houston, Charles Hamilton; Schooling in the USA; Separate-but-Equal; Supreme Court, U.S.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 495. 1954. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=347&invol=483.

Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294. 1955. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgibin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=349&invol=294.

Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227. 1940. http://supreme.justia.com/us/309/227/case.html.

Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238. 1972. http://supreme.justia.com/us/408/238/case.html. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637. 1950. http://supreme.justia.com/us/339/637/case.html.

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717. 1974. http://supreme.justia.com/us/418/717/case.html.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. 1896. http://supreme.justia.com/us/163/537/case.html.

Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1. 1948. http://supreme.justia.com/us/334/1/case.html.

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649. 1944. http://supreme.justia.com/us/321/649/case.html.

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1. 1971. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=402&invol=1.

Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629. 1950. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=339&invol=629.

Warren, Earl. 1954. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 U.S. 483. 1954. http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html.

Williams, Juan. 2000. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. NY: Three Rivers Press.

Khalilah L. Brown-Dean

MARSHALL, THURGOOD 1908-1993

Civil rights leader and supreme courtjustice

A Catalyst for Change

Thurgood Marshall was born on 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. Earlier that summer there had been a riot in which two black men were lynched in Springfield, Illinois. For many blacks and white liberals the brutalities were a call to action. A series of meetings ensued which, within a year, resulted in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This was an organization upon which Marshall would have profound effects. It also was where he formed his legal reputation, which ultimately led to his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1967.

From Humble Beginnings

Marshall's great-grandfather had been a slave who was freed by his Maryland owner. Marshall's father was a proud man who worked for a time as a railroad porter and later as a steward at a country club. Marshall's mother was a schoolteacher. At that time most blacks attended one school and whites another, and as a black teacher in a black school his mother earned much less than the teachers in the white schools. However, between her income and her husband's they managed to raise their children in a relatively comfortable and stable environment.

College

With his parents' financial help and by holding down a part-time job, Marshall was able to attend the prestigious Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, known as the "Black Princeton." Despite his roguish reputation, Marshall graduated in 1930 with honors and a wife, "Buster" Burrey, who was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. His application to the University of Maryland's law school was turned down because of his race, so Marshall enrolled at Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C.

An Attorney is Born

At Howard, Marshall graduated first in his class in 1933. As he later said, in law school he "found out what my rights were." Marshall's goal was to use the law to improve the conditions of black Americans. It was at Howard that he met Professors Charles Houston and William Hastie, who helped shape the young man's interest in civil rights.

Marshall's First Case

After graduation Marshall entered private practice. It was difficult going, trying to earn a living during the middle of the Great Depression, but a new direction was offered that had great significance both for Marshall and the nation as a whole. Hastie had become chief counsel for the NAACP, and he had its Baltimore office hire Marshall. One of the first cases that Marshall handled was a suit by Donald Murray, a young black graduate of Amherst College, who had applied to the University of Maryland Law School and had been denied admission because of his race. Marshall won the case in the Maryland courts, and the school was ordered to admit Murray. The lawsuit garnered national attention and marked the beginning of what became Marshall's personal crusade to end racial discrimination in education. In 1936 Marshall joined his mentor Houston in New York as assistant special counsel to the NAACP. When Houston resigned in 1938, Marshall became the special counsel. Two years later he was appointed head of the organization's newly created Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which provided free legal assistance to blacks suffering racial discrimination. He held that position for over twenty years.

Head of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Marshall was involved with many important lawsuits, ranging from the ending of all-white primaries, to striking down state enforcement of agreements to keep real estate from being sold to blacks, to integrating seating on trains and other modes of interstate travel. However, his most significant project was the drive to end segregated public education. In 1952 he litigated a case in South Carolina against a school system there. Later, this case was joined with several others on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Marshall made the oral argument, urging that the justices end segregation and an abandonment of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The resulting favorable decision crowned his long struggle against racial discrimination in education. The Supreme Court ordered the integration of public schools with "all deliberate speed," marking a new era in American education. Marshall's success was, however, followed by the death of his first wife in February 1955; later that year Marshall married Cecilia Suyat, an NAACP colleague.

Government Service

Marshall's work with the Legal Defense Fund had made him the most widely recognized and successful black attorney in the country. In 1961 he was nominated by President John F. Kennedy for a judgeship on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Marshall's confirmation process lasted over eleven months. His successes in civil rights cases had created many opponents, especially among southern senators. He was finally confirmed in September 1962. While on the bench Marshall was especially concerned with safeguarding the rights of criminal defendants. He was always particularly sensitive to the claims of individuals that their rights had been violated by the government. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson called upon Marshall to become the thirty-third solicitor general of the United States. The solicitor general handles all the government's appeals before the Supreme Court. Perhaps more important, he or she determines which few of the many possible government appeals will be made to that body. Marshall's appointment was widely viewed as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.

The Summit Is Reached

On 13 June 1967 these predictions were proven true when Marshall was nominated by President Johnson to replace retiring Justice Tom Clark on the Supreme Court. Johnson declared that nominating Marshall as the first black justice was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Again Marshall faced extended questioning by senators in his confirmation hearing. This time however, the process was less drawn out. He was confirmed at the end of August of that year by a vote of sixty-nine to eleven.

Casting a Long Shadow

On the Court, Marshall made a reputation as a judicial activist. He always kept foremost in mind the defense of individual rights. He often urged his colleagues not to be so blinded by legal reasoning as to lose touch with the plight of the people behind the facts. His sympathies extended especially to the poor and members of racial minorities whose rights, he felt, could at times be protected only by the courts. Marshall was especially determined to defend the gains he and others had made in civil rights and to extend them further. On 27 June 1991 Justice Marshall announced that his health required that he step down from the bench. Marshall's retirement at the age of eighty-two marked the loss of the Court's greatest advocate for civil rights.

Sources:

Susan Low Bloch, "Thurgood Marshall" in The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789-1993, edited by Clare Cushman (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1993);

"Choosing a Justice," Time, 89 (21 April 1967): 75-76;

Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, eds., The Justices of The United States Supreme Court, 1789-1978 (New York: Chelsea House, 1980);

"Negro Justice," Time, 89 (23 June 1967);

Carl T. Rowan, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993);

"The Tenth Member," Time, 86 (22 October 1963): 94;

"Toward the Seats," Time, 78 (22 September 1961): 25.

MARSHALL, THURGOOD

Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, saw law as a catalyst for social change. For nearly 60 years, as both a lawyer and a jurist, Marshall worked to dismantle the system of segregation and improve the legal and social position of minorities.

Marshall was born July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, the son of a Pullman porter and a schoolteacher. He was a graduate of Lincoln University, a small, all-black college in Pennsylvania, and Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. At Howard, Marshall excelled under the guidance of Vice Dean charles hamilton houston, the first African American to win a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Houston encouraged his students to become not just lawyers but "social engineers" who could use the legal system to improve society. Marshall graduated first in his law class in 1933.

Marshall's attendance at predominantly black Howard University illustrates the barriers faced by African Americans during the early twentieth century. Although Marshall wished to attend law school at the University of Maryland (a public institution in his home town of Baltimore), he was prohibited by law from doing so because of his race. This injustice helped set Marshall on a course of opposing all forms of official segregation that denied equal opportunities to African Americans.

"The government [that the framers of the Constitution] devised required several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, that we hold as fundamental today."
—Thurgood Marshall

After law school, Marshall set up a practice in Baltimore, representing indigent clients in civil rights cases. In 1936, his mentor Houston offered him a position with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), and in 1940, Marshall became director of the naacp legal defense and educational fund, a position he held until 1961. Determined to eliminate segregation, Marshall coordinated a nationwide campaign to integrate higher education. He filed several successful lawsuits against public graduate and professional schools that refused to accept African-American students. These suits paved the way for similar cases at the high school and elementary school levels. Marshall also journeyed throughout the deep South, traveling fifty thousand miles a year to fight jim crow laws (a series of laws that provided for racial segregation in the South) and to represent criminal defendants.

Marshall argued 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won 29 of them. No doubt his most famous and far-reaching triumph before the High Court was brown v. board of education of topeka, kansas, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). In that case, the father of African-American student Linda Brown sued the school board of Topeka, Kansas, over its segregation policy. Brown was required by law to attend an all African-American school several blocks from her home even though an all white public school was located in her own neighborhood. Under Kansas law, cities of more than 15,000 people, such as Topeka, could choose to operate segregated schools. Marshall argued that these segregated schools, defended by officials as "separate but equal," were unconstitutional.

The separate-but-equal doctrine originated in plessy v. ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256 (1896), a case allowing segregated public accommodations for whites

and blacks. In a plainspoken argument, Marshall dismissed as fallacy the notion that segregated schools offered the same educational experiences to black and white students. Sociological and psychological studies demonstrated that black children were in fact harmed by the policy of school segregation. The students' self-esteem was damaged and their future diminished when they were forced to accept inadequate facilities, equipment, and educational opportunities. Marshall argued that the only purpose segregation served was to perpetuate the myth of African-Americans' inferiority. A unanimous Court agreed and struck down the separate-but-equal doctrine, a

momentous victory for Marshall, affecting public schools in twenty-one states.

Marshall was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961, and served there until 1965 when he was named solicitor general for the United States. He was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 by President lyndon b. johnson and served as an associate justice for 24 years.

While on the Court, Marshall was known more for his impassioned dissents than for his majority opinions. In particular, as a staunch opponent of capital punishment, he regularly voiced his disagreement with the majority in death penalty cases. He was also a firm backer of affirmative action and contributed one of his most famous dissents in regents of the university of california v. bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. 2d 750 (1978). In that case, Marshall criticized the high court's ruling that a public medical school's policy of reserving 16 of 100 spots for minority students was unconstitutional. Marshall also dissented in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 93 S. Ct. 1278, 36 L. Ed. 2d 16 (1973), disagreeing with the majority view that a Texas property tax system used to fund public education was acceptable, even though it allowed wealthier districts to provide a better school system for students in those districts than less wealthy districts could provide. Marshall objected strongly to the property tax arrangement, claiming that it deprived poor children of an equal education.

Marshall wrote the majority opinion in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308, 88 S. Ct. 1601, 20 L. Ed. 2d 603 (1968), in which the Court declared that a shopping center was a public forum from which picketers could not be barred by private owners.

Marshall retired from the Court in 1991, but continued his criticism of government policies that were detrimental to African Americans or other disenfranchised groups.

Marshall died on January 24, 1993, in Bethesda, Maryland. Upon Marshall's death, nearly 20,000 mourners filed by his casket during the 12 hours it lay in state in the Great Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court.

further readings

Bland, Randall Walton. 2001. Justice Thurgood Marshall: Crusader for Liberalism: His Judicial Biography (1908–1993). Bethesda, Md.: Academica Press.

Clemon, U.W., and Bryan K. Fair. 2003. "Lawyers, Civil Disobedience, and Equality in the Twenty-First Century: Lessons from Two American Heroes. Alabama Law Review, 54 (spring): 959–83.

Kennedy, Randall. 1999. "Thurgood's Coming": Long Before He Became the Nation's First Black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall Was a Lawyer on the Razor's Edge of American Social Struggle. American Lawyer 21 (December): 94.

Maloy, Richard H.W. 1999. "Thurgood Marshall and the Holy Grail—the Due Process Jurisprudence of a Consummate Jurist." Pepperdine Law Review 26 (January): 289–352.

Tushnet, Mark V. 1997. Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961–1991. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. 2000. New York: Times Books.

cross-references

Civil Rights Movement; Integration; School Desegregation.

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) was an American civil rights lawyer, solicitor general, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, where his mother was a teacher and his father a headwaiter and country club steward. Parental qualities of thoroughness, excellence, justice, and equality, along with humility, pride, and aggressiveness, early impressed him. Marshall attended Lincoln University, where he received his bachelor's degree cum laude, and then enrolled in the law school at Howard University in 1930, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1933. While at Howard he came under the influence of Charles Houston and the group of legal scholars who developed and perfected techniques and procedures for civil rights litigation.

Passing the Maryland bar in 1933, Marshall practiced in Baltimore until 1938, serving also as counsel for the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1935 he successfully attacked segregation and discrimination in education when he participated in the desegregation of the University of Maryland Law School (where he had been denied admission because of race). Marshall became director of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1939. A year earlier he had been admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the fourth, fifth, and eighth circuits, and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Winning 29 of the 32 civil rights cases which he and his aides argued before the Supreme Court (and sometimes threatened with death as he argued cases in the lower courts of some southern states), Marshall earned the reputation of "America's outstanding civil rights lawyer." Some of the important cases he argued, which became landmarks in the destruction of segregation, as well as constitutional precedents with their decisions, include Smith v. Allwright (1944), establishing the rights of African-Americans to vote in Democratic primary elections; Morgan v. Virginia (1946), outlawing the state's segregation policy as applied to interstate bus transportation; Shelley v. Kramer (1948), outlawing restrictive covenants in housing; and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), requiring admission of an African-American student to the University of Texas Law School. The most famous was Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregation in public schools and for all practical purposes "sounded the death knell for all forms of legally sanctioned segregation."

The NAACP sent Marshall to Japan and Korea in 1951 to investigate complaints that African-American soldiers convicted by U. S. Army courts-martial had not received fair trials. His appeal arguments got the sentences of 22 of the 40 men reduced.

President John Kennedy nominated Marshall on Sept. 23, 1961, for judge of the Second Court of Appeals; he was confirmed by the Senate a year later after undergoing strenuous hearings. Three years later Marshall accepted President Lyndon Johnson's appointment as solicitor general. In this post Marshall successfully defended the United States in a number of important cases concerning industry. Of no little interest was the fact that through his office he now defended civil rights actions as advocate for the American people instead of (as in his NAACP days) as counsel strictly for African-Americans; however, he personally did not argue cases in which he had previously been involved.

In 1967 President Johnson nominated Marshall as associate justice to the U. S. Supreme Court. Marshall's nomination was strenuously opposed by several Southern senators on the Judiciary Committee but nevertheless he was confirmed by a vote of 69 to 11. He took his seat on October 2, 1967, and was the first African-American justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

During his nearly quarter-century on the Supreme Court, he remained a strong advocate of individual rights and never wavered in his devotion to ending discrimination. He formed a key part of the Court's progressive majority which voted to uphold a woman's right to abortion. His majority opinions covered such areas as ecology, the right of appeal of persons convicted of narcotic charges, failure to report for and submit to induction into the U. S. Armed Forces, obscenity, and the rights of Native Americans.

The Reagan-Bush years in the White House and the slow dwindling of the liberal influence on the Court was a time of sadness for Marshall. Always tart tongued, in 1987 Marshall dismissed President Reagan in an interview with Ebony as "the bottom" in terms of his commitment to black Americans. He later told the magazine: "I wouldn't do the job of dogcatcher for Ronald Reagan." There is no question that Marshall viewed the actions of the conservative Republican presidents as a throwback to the days when "we (African-Americans) didn't really have a chance." Marshall was keenly disappointed when his friend and liberal colleague, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., retired from the Court due to ill heath. Marshall vowed to serve until he was 110 and then die "shot by a jealous husband." However, suffering heart attacks, pneumonia, blood clots, and glaucoma, Marshall himself was forced by illness to give up his seat in 1991. He died in 1993 at the age of 84.

Justice Marshall had been born during Theodore Roosevelt's administration but lived to see African-Americans rise to positions of power and influence in America. To no small degree, the progress of black Americans toward equal opportunity turned upon the legal victories won by him. By his death, even in retirement, he had risen to the stature of mythic hero. His numerous honors included more than 20 honorary degrees from educational institutions in America and abroad. The University of Maryland Law School was named in his honor, as were a variety of elementary and secondary schools around the nation. During his life he received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal (1946), the Negro Newspaper Publisher Association's Russwurm Medal (1948), and the Living Makers of Negro History Award of the lota Phi Lambda Sorority (1950), and his name was inscribed on the honor roll of the Schomburg History Collection of New York for the advancement of race relations. He enjoyed the family life of his second wife and their two sons, Thurgood Jr. and John, who themselves pursued careers in public life. Marshall's first wife died in 1955. A little over 6 feet tall and dignified and solemn in manner, but endowed with a sense of humor, Marshall portrayed homely virtues and a deep reverence for God. Unique as his career was, it epitomized the potential of American democracy.

Further Reading

For periodical articles dealing with Marshall's life and career, see Newsweek (Sept. 21, 1987 and Aug. 6, 1990). Of the numerous books on Marshall's life and career, a well-received analysis was contained in the twin volumes Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court 1936-1961 (1994) and Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court 1961-1991 (1997) by Mark V. Thusnet. An early biography of Marshall is Lewis H. Fenderson, ed., Thurgood Marshall (1969). □

Marshall, Thurgood (b. Baltimore, Md., 2 July 1908; d. Washington, D.C., 24 Jan. 1993; interred Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va.), associate justice, 1967–1991. Marshall, great‐grandson of a slave and the son of a dining car waiter and a schoolteacher, became the first African‐American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall earned his B.A. from Lincoln University in 1930, then entered Howard University Law School, where he studied under Charles Hamilton Houston, the dean credited with transforming Howard into a laboratory for civil rights litigation.

After Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard in 1933, Houston enlisted him to help with the civil rights battles being waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Working full time, first as special counsel for the NAACP and then as director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Marshall masterminded the litigation strategy that challenged racial oppression in education, housing, transportation, electoral politics, and criminal justice. Ultimately, Marshall was responsible for achieving twenty‐nine Supreme Court victories, including numerous landmark cases such as Smith v. Allwright (1944), Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the Court finally concluded that the doctrine of separate but equal was inherently unequal and unconstitutional.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall to be circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After a lengthy, hostile battle waged by Southern senators, Marshall was finally confirmed. In his four years on the circuit, Marshall wrote several important opinions, including one applying the Double Jeopardy Clause to the states, a position the Supreme Court later adopted in Benton v. Maryland (1969), with Marshall writing for the Court. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson named Marshall to be the first African‐American solicitor general of the United States.

Two years later, Johnson appointed Marshall to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to occupy the seat vacated by Tom C. Clark. During his long tenure, Marshall wrote many significant decisions in a wide variety of fields, including federal jurisdiction, federal preemption, antitrust, and the rights of Native Americans. But Marshall's most significant contributions were in constitutional law, where he made his mark with powerful majority opinions as well as passionate dissents.

Among Marshall's most noted First Amendment opinions were Stanley v. Georgia (1969), which held that individuals have a right to possess obscene materials in their own homes; Police Department of Chicago v. Mosley (1972), which established the important principle that government may not constitutionally favor some types of speech over others; and Linmark Associates, Inc. v. Township of Willingboro (1977), which held that a municipality could not constitutionally ban the use of “for sale” signs simply because it feared their use might contribute to “blockbusting” and “white flight.”

Marshall's contributions in matters of equal protection came primarily through dissenting opinions. Two powerful dissents, in Dandridge v. Williams (1970) and San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), criticized the rigidity of two‐tiered equal protection analysis in which classifications based on race and other suspect categories were subjected to strict scrutiny while all other classifications had to be merely “rational.” Marshall proposed a more flexible, “sliding scale” theory under which courts would examine the nature of the group, the extent to which it previously had been subjected to discrimination, and the importance of the interests affected by the legislation. Although the Court did not adopt Marshall's theory, his consistent criticism seems to have prodded the Court to somewhat greater flexibility.

In addition, Marshall's passionate views on affirmative action were powerfully articulated. In a 1986 speech to the Second Circuit, Marshall urged Americans to “[F]ace the simple fact that there are groups in every community which are daily paying the cost of the history of American injustice. The argument against affirmative action is … an argument in favor of leaving that cost to lie where it falls. Our fundamental sense of fairness, particularly as it is embodied in the guarantee of equal protection under the laws, requires us to make an effort to see that those costs are shared equitably while we continue to work for the eradication of the consequences of discrimination. Otherwise, we must admit to ourselves that so long as the lingering effects of inequality are with us, the burden will be borne by those who are least able to pay.”

These views may well have influenced a majority of the Court to conclude in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), and most recently again in *Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), that it is constitutionally permissible for institutions of higher education to consider race on a limited basis in order to achieve a diverse student population.

Probably the most personally agonizing subject for Marshall was capital punishment. When the Court upheld revised death‐penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Marshall began the practice of dissenting in every death penalty case, including each time the Court denied a petition for certiorari in a case involving the death penalty.

Marshall's life experiences enabled him to make sure his colleagues always knew whose ox was being gored. He was never reticent to make his views known. When the country was enthusiastically celebrating the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1989, Marshall noted that, with its acceptance of slavery, the Constitution was initially defective. Credit for its present stature belongs, he observed in the Harvard Law Review in 1987, not to the framers but “to those present who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them. The true miracle of the Constitution,” observed Marshall, “was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life” (p. 5).

Bibliography

Richard A. Kluger , Simple Justice (1976).
Thurgood Marshall , Reflections on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, Harvard Law Review 101 (1987): 1–5.
A Tribute to Justice Marshall, symposium in Harvard Blackletter Journal 6 (1989): 1–140.

Susan Low Bloch

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

Thurgood Marshall 1908–93, U.S. lawyer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1967–91), b. Baltimore. He received his law degree from Howard Univ. in 1933. In 1936 he joined the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As its chief counsel (1938–61), he argued more than 30 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in higher education. His presentation of the argument against the "separate but equal" doctrine achieved its greatest impact with the landmark decision handed down in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). His appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1961 was opposed by some Southern senators and was not confirmed until 1962. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court two years later; he was the first black to sit on the high court, where he consistently supported the position taken by those challenging discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and supported the rights of criminal defendants. His support for affirmative action led to his strong dissent in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). As appointments by Presidents Nixon and Reagan changed the outlook of the Court, Marshall found himself increasingly in the minority; in retirement he was outspoken in his criticism of the court.

Bibliography: See biography by J. Williams (1998); studies by R. W. Bland (1973) and H. Ball (1999); R. Kluger, Simple Justice (1976).

MARSHALL, THURGOOD 1908-1993

Director of legal defense and educational fund of naacp (1939-1961); associate justice of the supreme court (1967-1991)

Championing Civil Rights

Marshall's years at the NAACP were spent representing people who had been denied their legal rights because of their race. He won twenty-nine of the thirty-two civil rights cases he brought before the Supreme Court including the 1950 Sweatt v. Painter which set the ground for Brown.

In the National Spotlight

Marshall's most notable case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, put segregation squarely before the nation in 1954. He argued, along with George Hayes and James Nabrit, Jr., that the separated schools for black and white children were not equal and black students were being denied the equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Supreme Court Justice

His appointment to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 made him the first black to sit on the court. He was a respected justice throughout his term on the court, which ended with his retirement in 1992.

Source:

Carl Thomas Rowan, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (Boston: Little, Brown: 1993).

Marshall, Thurgood (1908–93) US lawyer and Supreme Court justice. As counsel (1938–62) for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he played a key role in obtaining US Supreme Court judgments against racial segregation in schools. He was appointed solicitor general (1965) and became the first African-American associate justice of the US Supreme Court (1967–91).