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Thurgood Marshall’s great-grandparents were slaves; he was the first black justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, from 1967 to 1991. He began his legal career as a pioneer of the fight for civil rights in the United States, and his performance in winning a court case was resounding historical, the case Brown against the Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, of fundamental importance in the elimination of racial segregation in the schools of the United States. The resolution of this court case is considered one of the most important civil rights victories of the 20th century in the United States.
“Thoroughgood” Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on January 24, 1908; the name they recorded him under was Thoroughgood. He was the second son of Norma and William Marshall. His mother was a teacher in an elementary school and his father worked as a porter on the railway. The Marshall family moved to Harlem, a New York neighborhood, when Thurgood was two years old. There his mother earned an advanced teaching degree from Columbia University. The family returned to Baltimore in 1913, when Thurgood was five years old. Back in Baltimore, Thurgood and his brother Aubrey attended a black-only elementary school, and his mother also taught at a segregated school. William Marshall had not finished high school and was then working as a waiter at a whites-only country club. On the second grade,Thoroughgood to Thurgood .
He did passably in high school, but often caused trouble in the classroom. As punishment for some of his pranks he was told to memorize parts of the United States Constitution. By the time he finished high school, Thurgood Marshall had learned the entire constitutional text. Thurgood Marshall was convinced that he wanted to study at the university, but he knew that his parents could not afford the tuition. He therefore began saving money while in high school, working as a delivery boy and waiter. Thurgood Marshall entered Lincoln University in Philadelphia in September 1925, a university historically reserved for black people. At that time he wanted to study dentistry.
university studies
Thurgood Marshall was actively incorporated into university life. He became the star of the debate club and joined a fraternity; he was also popular with the girls. But Thurgood Marshall knew that he had to have an income to support himself: he worked two jobs and supplemented that income with the winnings from him playing cards on campus. He maintained the defiant attitude that had gotten him so much trouble in high school that he was suspended twice for his fraternity pranks.
But Thurgood Marshall was also capable of participating in activities of community relevance. Like when he was part of an anti-segregation action at a local movie theater. Together with some friends, Thurgood Marshall went to a movie theater in downtown Philadelphia. There they were told to sit in the only place where black attendees were allowed to sit, on the balcony of the cinema. The young people refused and sat in the audience. Despite being insulted by the white attendees, they remained in those places and watched the film. From that moment they sat where they wanted every time they went to the movies.
Thurgood Marshall decided that he did not want to be a dentist when he was in his sophomore year at the University of Lincoln. Instead, he discovered that he could use his speaking skills by practicing law. Thurgood Marshall was a burly man, standing at 6’2″, which he later joked that his hands were probably too big for a dentist.
While in his junior year in college, Thurgood Marshall met Vivian Buster Burey, a student at the University of Pennsylvania. They fell in love and, despite the objections of his mother who believed they were too young and too poor, they were married in 1929, when Thurgood Marshall was entering his senior year at university.
After graduating from Lincoln University in 1930, Thurgood Marshall enrolled at Howard University Law School in Washington DC; like the University of Lincoln, a university for black people. There his brother Aubrey was studying at the Faculty of Medicine. He previously tried to study at the University of Maryland School of Law, but was denied admission because he was black. His mother pawned her engagement and wedding bands to help him pay for college tuition.
To save money, Thurgood Marshall lived with his wife in his parents’ house in Baltimore. And he had to take the train to Washington every day, where he worked three part-time jobs to make ends meet. Thurgood Marshall’s hard work paid off. He earned valedictorian grades his freshman year at the University of Maryland and landed an excellent job as a law school library clerk.
He worked there closely with the man who became his mentor, Law School Dean Charles Hamilton Houston. Charles Houston had been deeply affected by the discrimination he suffered as a soldier during World War I and had set out to educate a new generation of black lawyers. He envisioned these new lawyers practicing their profession to fight against racial discrimination. Charles Houston was convinced that this struggle should be based on the Constitution of the United States itself; His message deeply marked Thurgood Marshall.
While working in the Howard University Law Library, Thurgood Marshall met several attorneys and activists from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. He joined the organization and became an active member.
Thurgood Marshall graduated in 1933, ranking first in his class, and passed the bar exam the same year.
Your participation in the NAACP
That same year, 25-year-old Thurgood Marshall opened his own law firm in Baltimore. At first he had few clients and most of the cases were for minor charges, such as traffic tickets and theft. The social situation was critical, at the height of the Great Depression.
Thurgood Marshall then became more involved in the Baltimore NAACP, recruiting new members. However, because he was well educated, did not have very dark skin, and dressed well, he sometimes found it difficult to get along with members of the black community, who felt that Thurgood Marshall was more like a white man than a white man. black. But Thurgood Marshall’s personality and easy communication earned him many converts for the NAACP. Thurgood Marshall soon began taking on cases for the NAACP and was hired as legal counsel in 1935. As his reputation grew, Thurgood Marshall became known not only for his skill as a lawyer but also for his irreverent sense of humor. and his love of storytelling. In the late 1930s Thurgood Marshall represented black teachers in Maryland who received only half the salary of white teachers. Thurgood Marshall secured pay equalization agreements on nine Maryland school boards and, in 1939, he obtained a federal court ruling declaring race-based pay differentials for public school teachers unconstitutional.
In 1935 Thurgood Marshall worked on Murray v. Pearson, helping to increase black admissions to the University of Maryland Law School, the university that had turned him down for only five years. before.
Marshall was appointed chief counsel for the NAACP in New York in 1938. Having achieved a stable income, he and his wife moved to Harlem, where he had lived with his parents as a child. The new job involved an immense workload and a lot of travel; He usually worked on cases of racial discrimination, on issues such as housing, work and accommodation. And in 1940 Thurgood Marshall won his first high-profile case in the United States Supreme Court, Chambers v. Florida. In that case, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of four black men who had been beaten and forced to confess to murder.
In Dallas, a black man who had been summoned to juror duty was fired when court officials realized he was not white. Thurgood Marshall traveled to represent the man evicted for racial segregation, met with Texas Governor James Allred, and convinced him that blacks had the right to serve on a jury. The governor of Texas also promised to assign the Texas Rangers, the police force of the Texas Department of Public Safety, to protect black citizens who served on juries. But not all racial profiling situations Thurgood Marshall faced were so easily resolved, and he had to exercise extreme caution whenever he traveled, especially when he worked on controversial causes. He traveled protected by an NAACP bodyguard and wherever he went he had to stay in a safe house, usually in private homes. Even so, despite the security measures, Thurgood Marshall knew that he was at risk due to the many threats he received, and he was forced to use evasive tactics, such as disguising himself and changing cars during trips. In a small town in Tennessee, Thurgood Marshall was arrested by a group of police officers while working on a case. They forced him out of his car and took him to an isolated area, near a river, where an angry mob of white men waited. Thurgood Marshall’s partner, another black lawyer, followed the police car and refused to leave until he was released. Maybe because he was a prominent Nashville lawyer, an awkward witness,
A change in NAACP strategy
Through his tenure in the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall continued to make significant advances in the battle for racial equality on issues like voting rights and education. In Smith v. Allwright, which reached the United States Supreme Court in 1944, Thurgood Marshall argued that Texas Democratic Party policy unfairly denied black citizens the right to vote in primary elections. The Supreme Court agreed, ruling that all citizens, regardless of race, had the constitutional right to vote in primary elections.
But in 1945 the NAACP implemented a momentous change in its strategy. Rather than fight to enforce the separate but equal provision of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson judgment, the NAACP took a different approach to achieving racial equality. Since the premise of having separate but equal black and white facilities had never really been achieved, and it was ostensible that public services for blacks were consistently inferior to those for whites, the only solution was to make all facilities and services public were open to all communities.
Two cases involving Thurgood Marshall between 1948 and 1950 contributed significantly to the overturning of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling; they were Sweatt’s against Painter and McLaurin’s against the Oklahoma State Regents. In these cases, the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma did not provide black students with an education of equal quality to that provided to whites. The United States Supreme Court accepted Thurgood Marshall’s argument that universities did not provide equal facilities to both communities. The court ordered both universities to admit black students to their courses without any discrimination. Between 1940 and 1961 Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases that were heard by the United States Supreme Court.
The Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case
A court decision in Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, led to the most important case Thurgood Marshall ever faced. Oliver Brown had sued the Topeka Board of Education alleging that her daughter was forced to travel a great distance from her home just to attend a segregated school. Oliver Brown wanted his daughter to attend the school closest to his house, a school that only white people could attend. The Kansas District Court ruled against the application, stating that the black school offered an education equal to the quality of Topeka’s white schools. Thurgood Marshall led the appeal of the Brown case, which was combined with four other similar cases and filed as Brown v. Board of Education. The case reached the United States Supreme Court in December 1952.
In his address to open the case before the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall made it clear that he was not only looking for a favorable resolution of the appeals raised in the five cases, but that the objective was to end racial segregation in schools. He argued that the segregation of black students made them feel inferior at a very early stage in their lives. The attorney defending the original resolution argued that integrating black and white children would harm white children.
The debate lasted for three days. The Supreme Court adjourned on December 11, 1952 and reconvened to deal with the case only in June 1953. But the judges did not issue a ruling, instead asking the lawyers to provide more information on the case. The main question was: did the lawyers believe that the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which addresses citizenship rights, prohibited segregation in schools? Thurgood Marshall and his team set to work to prove that the answer was yes .
The case was retried in the Supreme Court in December 1953, but the ruling had to wait until May 17, 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that the Supreme Court had reached a unanimous decision of that segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Thurgood Marshall was more than satisfied with the resolution; he always believed they would win, but was surprised that there were no votes against.
The ruling in the case like Brown v. Board of Education did not automatically desegregate schools in the southern United States; while some school boards began planning for desegregation, few districts bothered to implement the Supreme Court’s decision.
The death of his wife and a new marriage
In November 1954 Thurgood Marshall received the news that his wife was terminally ill; she had been ill for several months and had been misdiagnosed with pleurisy when she actually had cancer. He was 44 years old and they had been married for 25 years, but Buster had several miscarriages, leaving them childless. Upon learning the diagnosis of the terminal illness, Buster kept it a secret; when Thurgood Marshall found out, he left his job and stayed with his wife for nine weeks, until he died in February 1955.
In December 1955, Thurgood Marshall married again, this time to Cecilia Cissy Suyat, a secretary for the NAACP; she was 47 years old and his new wife was 19 years younger. They had two sons, Thurgood junior and John.
federal government attorney
In September 1961 Thurgood Marshall was appointed as a judge on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals by President John F. Kennedy. Although he did not want to leave his job with the NAACP, Marshall accepted the nomination, although it took nearly a year to be approved by the Senate, many of whose members still resented his involvement in desegregation in the schools. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to the position of United States Attorney General; his role was to represent the government in lawsuits against it. In his two years as attorney general, he won 14 of the 19 cases in which he represented the federal government.
The Supreme Court of Justice
On June 13, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he was nominating Thurgood Marshall as a nominee for Justice of the United States Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by Justice Tom C. Clark. Some southern senators, notably Strom Thurmond, opposed his confirmation, but Thurgood Marshall was ultimately confirmed and sworn in on October 2, 1967. At the age of 59, Thurgood Marshall became the first person to black race to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Thurgood Marshall took a liberal stance on most of the Supreme Court’s rulings. He consistently voted against any form of censorship and was strongly opposed to the death penalty. In Roe v. Wade in 1973, he voted with the majority to respect a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Marshall was in favor of affirmative action , public policies intended to compensate for situations of discrimination.
As more conservative justices were appointed to the Supreme Court during the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, Thurgood Marshall frequently found himself in the minority on the ballot, often being the only dissenting voice; he came to classify him as the great dissident .
In 1980 the University of Maryland named its new law library in 1980 after Thurgood Marshall, but remembering that the university had turned him down 50 years earlier, he refused to attend the opening. He was not contemplating retirement, but in the early 1990s his health deteriorated considerably, with hearing and eye problems. On June 27, 1991, he submitted his letter of resignation from the United States Supreme Court to President George W. Bush. Thurgood Marshall died at the age of 84 of heart failure, on January 24, 1993; he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. Thurgood Marshall was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Bill Clinton in November 1993.
Sources
Cassie, Ron. The Legacy of Thurgood Marshall. Baltimore Magazine , January 25, 2019.
Crowther, Linnea. Thurgood Marshall: 20 Facts. Legacy.com , January 31, 2017.
Thurgood Marshalls Unique Supreme Court Legacy. National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.org.
