Marshall, Thurgood

(b. 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland; d. 24 January 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland), lawyer and jurist who was chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the first African American to sit as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Marshall was the son of William C. Marshall, a dining room steward at an all-white club, and Norma Arica Williams, a teacher. Marshall attended public schools in segregated Baltimore, where the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson legitimized the separation of the races and placed the Court’s imprimatur on state-mandated Jim Crowism. As a young man, he had to address racism in the streets with his fists. “Son,” Marshall’s father admonished, “if anyone ever calls you a nigger, you not only got my permission to fight him”you got my orders to fight him.’ He graduated from Frederick Douglass High School, then attended Lincoln University, a predominantly black school in Pennsylvania. In 1929 he married Vivian “Buster” Burey. After graduation in 1930, he entered the predominantly black Howard University Law School. He had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of his race, but Marshall was able to “remedy” this slight in 1935, when he won a lawsuit in the Maryland Court of Appeals that ordered the Law School to admit black students.

At Howard, Marshall was exposed to the teachings of Charles Hamilton Houston, who encouraged his students to think of lawyers as social engineers. For Houston, lawyers should “shape litigation into a vehicle for sustained social protest, choosing a case to argue not only on the basis of an individual’s need but also on the basis of the needs of a cause.” Marshall adopted the Houston definition of attorney as public interest lawyer. After graduating first in his class from Howard Law School in 1933, Marshall practiced

law in Baltimore, then in 1934 went to work for the NAACP under Houston, who was the NAACP’s first full-time salaried special counsel. When Houston stepped down in 1938, Marshall became the director of the NAACP’s newly created Legal Defense and Education Fund. He won fourteen civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court while with the NAACP. After the University of Maryland desegregation case in 1935, Marshall successfully argued the unconstitutionality of excluding black voters from primary elections (Smith v. Allwright, 1944), racial restrictions in housing (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), and, in two cases in 1950, separate-but-equal facilities in state universities (Sweatt v. Painter and McLauren v. Oklahoma State Regents).

His most famous case before the Supreme Court was Brown v. Board of Education of Topera (1954), which overturned the separate-but-equal racial segregation policy in public schools and signaled the end of the era of segregation in all public facilities. In February of the following year his wife died, and in December he married Cecilia “Cissy” Suyat; they had two children.

In 1961 Marshall was nominated for the Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals by President John F. Kennedy. As shown in the Senate confirmation hearings, there was great consternation in the legislature and in the nation about the appointment of an African American to the federal appeals bench. Senators such as North Carolina’s Sam Ervin and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, cognizant of Marshall’s legal successes against Jim Crowism in the federal courts, did not believe that Marshall had the intelligence or the temperament to serve as a federal appeals court judge.

Furthermore, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy tried to block the appointment. One tense conversation between the two ended when Kennedy started talking about the trouble with ’you people.’ Marshall broke off the conversation, saying, ’I never like anybody [calling] me “you people,” because I know what they’re talking about.’ Marshall rejected the offer, stating to Kennedy that the ’trouble with you is that you are different from me. You don’t know what it means, but all I’ve had in my life is nothing. It’s [rejection] not new to me. So goodbye.’ President Kennedy, however, pressed for the appointment, and after nearly a year of delay and attacks by southerners in the Senate, Marshall was confirmed.

Marshall’s appointment in 1961 by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the position of U.S. solicitor general was seen as an action of “racial preference” by many (as was Kennedy’s appointment of Marshall to the Court of Appeals) who believed that Marshall really was fundamentally inferior and unfit to serve on the federal courts. After President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Court, was depicted, even by his brethren, as a person who was appointed because of his race. Behind his back some even referred to Marshall as the “house nigger.” But for Marshall there was always the belief that the law would, in the end, open the doors to equal opportunity for blacks and other minorities in America. “If we are ever to become a fully integrated society,” wrote Marshall in a dissent in 1978, ’one in which the color of a person’s skin will not determine the opportunities available to him or her, we must be willing to take steps to open those doors.’

Marshall believed that a task of judges, when adjudicating concrete cases before them, was to try to ensure that all persons have the possibility of living in a “just and humane society.” He believed that all persons have the right to be free of all forms of capricious discrimination; that all persons must have access to decent education, decent housing, and decent jobs; and that all persons have a significant interest in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause to be free from governmental interference in their personal lives. He also believed that, in order to maintain and protect these valued liberties, the courts had to be available to all persons, regardless of their financial status. Again and again he was very critical of a Court majority that ignored the peculiar circumstances of the impoverished. This meant that the Supreme Court justice’s role in a constitutional republic was to give meaning to the evolving words of the Constitution in such a manner as to provide justice to the weak and the underclasses who needed its protections. For the justices of the Supreme Court to ignore their legal and constitutional oaths to provide justice for both the rich and the poor was an unforgivable lack of fundamental fairness. Unfortunately, such decisions by the Court majority while Marshall served on the Supreme Court were not uncommon, and he spoke out, in conference and in his dissents.

For example, in San Diego Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court upheld the constitutionality of using local property taxes to finance schools, thereby enabling school districts with high property tax bases to provide better schools than poorer districts. Marshall, however, dissented, believing that state policies that have the effect of discriminating on the basis of wealth were subject to judicial scrutiny. In his opinion, the Constitution provided the “right of every American to an equal start in life.” Equality of opportunity was a value he had seen as primary when fighting the NAACP battles in federal courts. As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall continued to argue for its primacy, finding it in the language of the Constitution.

Although Marshall often said he would never retire from the Court, failing health prevented him from staying on until a new presidential administration could appoint another liberal to his seat. In June 1991, about a month before his eighty-third birthday, he announced his retirement for health reasons. A reporter asked him what was wrong, and Marshall replied, “I’m old. I’m getting old and coming apart.” His retirement took effect in October.

Just days before his death in January 1993, Marshall was

scheduled to swear in the newly elected Democratic vice president, Al Gore, but his health prevented him from doing so. He died of heart failure at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” Marshall fought battles against racism and segregation at a time when black legal advocates confronted extreme danger. “You know,” said an elderly African American cabdriver, “Marshall was like Joe Louis for us. He was the black man who was always there to inspire you. The white folk would send up their best against him, and he would knock them out time after time.” Marshall was the consummate lawyer, in his own words “a man of the law.” Law mattered for him more than any other societal norm. One of his clerks said, he ’is someone who deeply believes in the law. . . . He has faith that the law matters—that it is a real thing you can point to and say, “This is the right answer” or “This is the wrong answer.”

Marshall’s letters and papers are located at the Madison Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Biographies of Marshall are Howard Ball, A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence ofRaasm in America (1999); Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark, Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench (1992); Roger Goldman and David Gallen, Thurgood Marshall: Justice for All (1992); and CarlT. Rowan, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1993). For information on Marshall’s civil rights cases before he became a Supreme Court justice, see Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (1994); and MarkTushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (1987) and Maying Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961. Articles of interest on Marshall’s views of the law and justice are: Kevin T. Baine, “Wit, Wisdom, and Compassion of Justice Thurgood Marshall,” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 20 (spring 1993): 497-502; Lucius J. Barker, “Thurgood Marshall, the Law, and the System: Tenets of an Enduring Legacy,” Stanford Law Review 44 (summer 1992): 1237-1247; Susan Low Bloch, “Thurgood Marshall: Courageous Advocate, Compassionate Judge,” Georgetown Law Review 80 (1993): 2003-2009; and Juan Williams, “Marshall’s Law: The Triumph of Thurgood Marshall,” Washington Post Magazine (7 Jan. 1990). An obituary is in the New York Times (25 Jan. 1993).

Howard Ball