MARSHALL, Thurgood

(b. 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland; d. 24 January 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland), pioneering civil rights attorney who fought tirelessly for the equal treatment of all Americans under the law and who was the first African-American justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Marshall was the elder of two sons of William Canfield Marshall and Norma Williams. His father, a waiter at a "whites only" yacht club on Chesapeake Bay, and his mother, a teacher at a segregated elementary school, instilled in Marshall an appreciation for the importance of pride, humility, justice, equality, and the pursuit of excellence. From his father, Marshall learned the value of a rebellious spirit. Later in his life, Marshall recalled his father's admonishment to both his sons: "If anyone calls you a nigger, you not only got my permission to fight him, you got my orders to fight him." Thankfully, Marshall was largely insulated from the sting of racism during his childhood in Baltimore, where his family lived in a modest but comfortable home on Druid Hill Avenue. As a boy, he routinely played with both black and white children.

An undistinguished scholar in the public schools of Baltimore, Marshall later described himself as something of a "cutup" who was often punished by being banished to the school's basement to memorize a passage from the U.S. Constitution. After graduation from high school, he enrolled at Lincoln University in the rolling countryside of Pennsylvania's Chester County, not far from Philadelphia. Graduating with honors in 1930, Marshall was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School on the basis of race, a policy he later challenged successfully on behalf of another black student. He enrolled instead at Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., from which he graduated first in his class in 1933. Marshall married Vivian Burey in 1929; she died in 1955 after a long illness. They had no children. He remarried a year later to Cecilia A. Suyat, a secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with whom he had two sons.

Returning to his hometown after graduation, Marshall set up a private practice specializing in civil rights and criminal law. He also served as counsel to the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, a position that soon brought him to the attention of Arthur Springarn, the organization's national president. In 1936 he moved to New York City to serve as assistant to the NAACP's chief counsel, two years after which he was named to replace the retiring chief counsel. From 1940 until 1961, Marshall served as director of the NAACP's legal defense and educational fund. During this period he was the chief strategist of the organization's legal assault against racial discrimination, winning twenty-nine of thirty-two such cases argued before the Supreme Court. Marshall captured national attention in the mid-1950s when he successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education before the high court. The Court's decision struck down the legal justification for "separate but equal" public school facilities and, more than any other single event, laid the groundwork for the civil rights struggle of the late 1950s and 1960s.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall for a federal judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (an area covering New York, Vermont, and Connecticut). Southern segregationists in the Senate pulled out all the stops in their unsuccessful effort to block Marshall's confirmation, a process that took nearly a year. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson named Marshall solicitor general, in which position he argued cases on behalf of the federal government before the Supreme Court. Of the nineteen cases he argued before the high court over the next two years, Marshall won fourteen. Thurgood's most famous case as solicitor general was Miranda v. Arizona, in which he argued successfully that law enforcement officers must inform all criminal suspects of their constitutional rights.

President Johnson in 1967 nominated Marshall to fill a Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Tom Clark. Despite violent opposition from four southern members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Marshall eventually was confirmed by a vote of sixty-nine to eleven in the full Senate. He took his seat on the high court on 2 October 1967 and quickly established himself as the Court's most outspoken member on matters of racial justice. Juan Williams, writing in Ebony magazine, said of Marshall: "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." Former Justice William Brennan, one of Marshall's liberal allies on the Court, later 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." Six years after his nomination of Marshall to the high court, Johnson said of his decision that it was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man, and the right place."

In his early years on the Supreme Court, liberals dominated the nation's highest judicial panel, a comfortable environment for Marshall, who was an avowed liberal on most issues. He developed a particularly close relationship with some of his fellow liberals on the bench, namely Brennan and William O. Douglas. For his first several years on the high court, Marshall cast few dissenting votes. Among the more important of Marshall's majority decisions during the 1960s were Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza in 1968 and Stanley v. Georgia in 1969. In the former case, the majority ruled that striking union members could not be barred from picketing at a shopping center, which the Court held was a "public forum." In Stanley v. Georgia, the Court held that the private possession of pornography could not be subject to prosecution. In his written contribution to the majority opinion, Marshall observed: "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."

Marshall ruled with the majority in Roe v. Wade that a woman has the right to an abortion without interference from the government in the first trimester of pregnancy, contending that it is part of her "right to privacy." Years after the Court's landmark decision legalizing abortion, internal Court memos revealed an exchange between Marshall and Justice Harry A. Blackmun in which Marshall expressed concern that Blackmun's proposal focused too much attention on the end of the first thirteen weeks of pregnancy, thus allowing the states too much control after the first trimester. In response Blackmun modified the majority opinion somewhat, altering it to say that after approximately the first trimester, states could regulate abortion to protect the mother's health.

Throughout his years on the Supreme Court, Marshall fought vigorously against capital punishment. During one notable death penalty argument, Justice William H. Rehnquist suggested that the repeated appeals of an inmate had cost taxpayers too much money. Marshall interrupted Rehnquist's argument to say: "It would have been cheaper to shoot him right after he was arrested, wouldn't it?" Outside the courtroom of the high court, Marshall enjoyed a reputation as a master storyteller with an earthy sense of humor. Of his colleague's storytelling skills, Justice Brennan wrote in the Harvard Law Review: "The locales are varied—from dusty courtrooms in the Deep South, to a confrontation with General MacArthur in the Far East, to the drafting sessions for the Kenyan Constitution." According to Brennan, Marshall's stories, while designed to entertain, served a deeper purpose. Brennan saw the tales as Marshall's way to preserve the past while removing some of the period's less pleasant memories. "They are also a form of education for the rest of us. Surely, Justice Marshall recognized that the stories made us—his colleagues—confront walks of life we had never known."

According to Marshall's obituary in the New York Times, many of his stories recounted the dangers and hostility that he had experienced as a civil rights lawyer, traveling thousands of miles throughout the American South representing indigent black clients and unpopular causes. In one such story, Marshall told of being arrested in Tennessee on trumped-up drunk-driving charges shortly after he and a colleague had won acquittal for a black defendant. According to Marshall's story, he was brought before a magistrate who told him: "If you're not drunk, will you take my test? Will you blow in my face? I'm a teetotaler, and I can smell the least bit of whiskey." Marshall, who stood six feet, two inches tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, said of the magistrate: "He was a short man. I put my hands on his shoulders and breathed just as hard as I could into the man's face." The case against Marshall was quickly dismissed. In a postscript to his story, Marshall added, "We drove to Nashville. And then, boy, I really wanted a drink!"

In 1973 Marshall dissented from the Court's majority opinion in San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, which held that the property tax system used by Texas and a number of other states to finance public education did not violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. Under such systems, school districts with generous tax bases can afford to provide better schools than less wealthy districts. In his dissent Marshall accused the majority of an "unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens." Arguing that the right to an education should be considered a "fundamental" constitutional right, Marshall contended that state policies that have the effect of discriminating on the basis of wealth should be subject to especially searching judicial scrutiny. He wrote: "In my judgment, the right of every American to an equal start in life … is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record."

The 1980s saw marked changes in the makeup of the Court, as Republican administrations added more conservative justices to the judicial panel. Despite finding himself in the Court's ever-shrinking liberal minority, Marshall publicly declared his intention to serve out his lifetime appointment. As time went on, however, he grew increasingly unhappy with the policies of the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and new rulings that he felt seriously eroded earlier civil rights gains. Even more frustrating to Marshall was what he saw as a lack of understanding among his fellow justices about the effects of racism on American society as a whole. Failing health finally forced Marshall to step down from the Supreme Court in 1991. He died of heart failure at the age of eighty-four.

A major figure in American public life for more than half a century, Thurgood Marshall was responsible for mapping out the legal strategy that brought to an end the era of government-sanctioned segregation in the United States. In 1967 he became the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, a position in which he remained for twenty-four years. During more than two decades as director and counsel of the NAACP's legal defense and educational fund, Marshall decided to take the struggle for equal rights to the courts. It was before the Supreme Court in 1954 that Marshall won his greatest legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. That unanimous decision by the high court struck down the "separate but equal" system of racial separation in effect in the public schools of twenty-one states. Even more important, it laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.

An unabashed liberal during his quarter century as a Supreme Court justice, Marshall was a strong advocate of individual rights, never wavering in his dedication to the elimination of discrimination in all its varied forms. Interviewed by People, Benjamin Hooks, the former executive director of the NAACP, said of Marshall: "It's my belief that without Thurgood Marshall, we would still be riding in the back of the bus, going to separate schools, and drinking 'colored' water."

Further insight into the life and career of Thurgood Marshall may be found in Lisa Aldred, Thurgood Marshall (1991); Randall Walton Bland, Private Pressure on Public Law: The Legal Career of Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1934–1991 (1993); Joseph Nazel, Thurgood Marshall: Supreme Court Justice (1993); Mark V. Tushnet, Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961–1991 (1997), and, as editor, Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences (2001); and Mark Rowh, Thurgood Marshall: Civil Rights Attorney and Supreme Court Justice (2002). An obituary is in the New York Times (25 Jan. 1993).

Don Amerman