Thurgood Marshall: Champion of Civil Rights and Legal Pioneer
Thurgood Marshall was a monumental figure in American history, renowned for his tireless advocacy for civil rights and his groundbreaking achievements in the legal field. He served as the first African American Supreme Court Justice, leaving an indelible mark on the nation's legal landscape. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which declared unconstitutional racial segregation in American public schools.
Early Life and Education
Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on June 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. Tired of having his friends poke fun at his first name, he decided to try to improve the situation and, at the age of six, legally changed it to Thurgood. His parents were William Canfield Marshall, a railroad porter and a steward at an all-white country club, and Norma Williams Marshall, an elementary school teacher. His father instilled in him the importance of standing up for his beliefs, while his early exposure to the Constitution ignited a passion for law and justice. Marshall immediately liked the document and set about memorizing various parts of it. He took special interest in Article III and the Bill of Rights. Article III establishes the judicial branch of government and the Bill of Rights lists the rights that all American citizens are supposed to enjoy. Growing up in an era when Jim Crow laws still permeated much of the country, Marshall knew that many African-Americans were not enjoying all of their constitutional rights. From an early age, Marshall was aware of racial injustices in America, and he decided to do something about them. Moreover, he also knew that the courts might be the best means for doing so.
Marshall's educational journey began at the all-black Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), the oldest African-American institution of higher education in the country, where he graduated with honors in 1930. He then sought admission to the University of Maryland Law School but was denied due to his race. This discriminatory experience fueled his determination to fight for equal rights. Marshall sought admission into Howard University Law School following his denial of admission on the basis of his race into University of Maryland Law School.
He enrolled at Howard University Law School, where he excelled under the mentorship of Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice-dean of the law school. He received his degree in 1933, ranking first in his class. Unbeknownst to him, this decision directed his professional career where he championed for equal rights - particularly on the basis of race. The dean of Howard law, Charles Hamilton Houston, became his mentor and instilled in him the passion to advocate for the oppressed and voiceless. Houston, who directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, encouraged Marshall and other law students to view the law as a vehicle for social change. It was at Howard University that Marshall met Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice-dean of the law school. In 1935, Houston directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Marshall was his right-hand man.
Early Legal Career and NAACP Advocacy
Upon his graduation from Howard, Marshall began the private practice of law in Baltimore. Marshall's first major court case came in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray. Among his first legal victories was Murray v. Pearson (1935), a suit accusing the University of Maryland of violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws by denying an African American applicant admission to its law school solely on the basis of race. Shortly after joining the Maryland Bar, Thurgood Marshall visited the Maryland State Library (now, the Thurgood Marshall State Law Library) and signed the visitor log.
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In 1936, Marshall joined the staff of the NAACP. He later became the chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where he fought for racial equality by taking on challenging cases to end state-sponsored discrimination like Brown v. Board of Education. Together with Houston, Marshall participated in the cases Murray v. Maryland (1936) and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938). When Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall took over the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 1940, he was named chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which was created to mount a legal assault against segregation.
Throughout the 1940s and ’50s Marshall distinguished himself as one of the country’s top lawyers, winning 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. Some of his notable cases include:
- Smith v. Allwright (1944), which found that states could not exclude Black voters from primaries
- Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which struck down race-based restrictive housing covenants
- Sweatt v. Painter(1950), which deemed separate facilities for Black professional and graduate students unconstitutional
- McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education (1950).
Having won these cases, and thus, establishing precedents for chipping away Jim Crow laws in higher education, Marshall succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
It was during this time that Marshall realized that the holding in Plessy was inherently flawed, for "separate" could never be "equal." Marshall had always felt that the only way for African-Americans, or anyone for that matter, to succeed was to receive an education. Yet, the discrepancy in the caliber of education for whites and blacks was made all too apparent to him when, one day while traveling with Houston, Marshall witnessed a black child biting into an orange. He had received such a poor education that he neither knew what it was nor how to properly eat it. From this point on, Marshall and Houston were dedicated to a strategy which aimed at ending segregation.
Brown v. Board of Education
Without a doubt, however, it was Marshall’s victory before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that established his reputation as a formidable and creative legal opponent and an advocate of social change. Indeed, students of constitutional law still examine the oral arguments of the case and the ultimate decision of the Court from both a legal and a political perspective. Marshall's most famous case was the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Educationcase in which Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren noted, "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
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Legally, Marshall argued that segregation in public education produced unequal schools for African Americans and whites-a key element in the strategy to have the Court overrule the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Yet it was Marshall’s reliance on psychological, sociological, and historical data that presumably sensitized the Court to the deleterious effects of institutionalized segregation on the self-image, social worth, and social progress of African American children.
Appointment to the Federal Judiciary and Supreme Court
After Brown, Marshall argued many more court cases in support of civil rights. His zeal for ensuring the rights of all citizens regardless of race caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy, who nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. President Lyndon B. Johnson further elevated Marshall's career, first appointing him solicitor general in July 1965 (the lawyer who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court; it is the third highest office in the Justice Department). He went on to win 14 of the 19 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court for the government. Subsequently, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court on June 13, 1967, with Marshall once again being the first African-American to hold the office. Senate on August 30, 1967.
Tenure on the Supreme Court and Judicial Philosophy
During Marshall’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he was a steadfast liberal, stressing the need for equitable and just treatment of the country’s minorities by the state and federal governments. He fought for affirmative action for minorities, held strong against the death penalty, and supported of a woman's right to choose if an abortion was appropriate for her.
Marshall’s approach, known as the “sliding scale,” took into account a wider variety of factors affecting equal protection and a larger number of groups whose equal protection rights were apparently being violated under federal and state laws. Marshall thus famously dissented in Dandrige v. Williams (1970), arguing that state limits on welfare payments should not be the same for all families because not all families are the same size; in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), arguing that school funding based on local property taxes unfairly limits the educational opportunities of students in poorer school districts; and Milliken v. Bradley (1974), arguing that preventing federal courts from ordering school desegregation between racially divided cities and suburbs amounts to an “emasculation of our constitutional guarantee of equal protection.”
Marshall served on the Supreme Court as it underwent a period of major ideological change. In his early years on the bench, he fit comfortably among a liberal majority under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren. As the years passed, however, many of his closest allies, including Warren, either retired or died in office, creating opportunities for Republican presidents to swing the pendulum of activism in a conservative direction. By the time he retired in 1991, he was known as “the Great Dissenter,” one of the last remaining liberal members of a Supreme Court dominated by a conservative majority.
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