Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall

b. July 2, 1908, Baltimore, MD
d. January 24, 1993, Washington, D.C.

Education: Lincoln University, Pennsylvania (BA) Howard University (LLB)

An influential leader of the civil rights movement for racial justice.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
(1967-1991)

The first African American ever to serve on the Court

Thurgood Marshall founded LDF in 1940, serving as its first Director-Counsel until 1961. He became the first black Supreme Court Justice when he was confirmed by the Senate on August 30, 1967. After nomination by President Lyndon B. Johnson and confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Marshall served as Associate Justice from 1967-1991. He retired from the bench in 1991 and passed away on January 24, 1993 in Washington, D.C. at the age of 84.

Thurgood Marshall was the leading architect of the strategy that ended state-sponsored segregation.  Thurgood Marshall’s visionary legal work at the Legal Defense Fund was an unrivaled contribution to the Civil Rights Movement and helped change the arc of American history forever. 

Marshall was the key strategist in the effort to end racial segregation, in particular meticulously challenging Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court-sanctioned legal doctrine that called for “separate but equal” structures. Marshall won a series of court decisions that gradually struck down that doctrine, ultimately leading to Brown v. Board of Education, which he argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, finally overturning “separate but equal” and acknowledging that segregation greatly diminished students’ self-esteem. 

Marshall’s status as a pillar of the Civil Rights Movement is confirmed and upheld by LDF and other organizations that strive to uphold the principles of civil rights and racial justice. His legacy cannot be overstated: he worked diligently and tirelessly to end what was America’s official doctrine of separate but equal. 

Bio

Thurgood Marshall, the first African American ever to serve on the Court.. He was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Marshall, a railroad porter, who later worked on the staff of Gibson Island Club, a white-only country club and Norma Williams, a school teacher. One of his great-grandfathers had been taken as a slave from the Congo to Maryland where he was eventually freed. Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in 1930 and applied to the University of Maryland Law School – he was denied admission because the school was still segregated at that time. So Marshall matriculated to Howard University Law School where he graduated first in his class and met his mentor, Charles Hamilton Huston, with whom he enjoyed a lifelong friendship. In an interview published in 1992 in the American Bar Association Journal, Marshall wrote that “Charlie Houston insisted that we be social engineers rather than lawyers,” a mantra that he upheld and personified.

Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in 1930 and applied to University of Maryland Law School but was turned down because of his race. He then attended Howard University Law School, though his mother had to pawn her wedding and engagement rings to pay the tuition. He graduated first in his class in 1933, just as America was feeling the full impact of the Great Depression.

As soon as he graduated, Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore, and the following year he represented the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in a suit challenging the University of Maryland Law School’s policy of segregation. He won the case, and Marshall was brought onto the national staff of the NAACP in 1936, becoming the organization’s chief legal counsel in 1940. He remained with the NAACP for a total of 25 years and served as its key strategist in the legal effort to end racial segregation throughout American society. In a series of federal court cases, Marshall and his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, set out to reverse segregation sanctioned by the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Since that decision had called for “separate but equal” institutions for blacks and whites, the NAACP argued that institutions for African Americans were not equal to the parallel institutions for whites. A series of decisions ruled in favor of the NAACP, and, beginning in 1945, Marshall began challenging the Plessy doctrine itself. This ultimately led to the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, which Marshall successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and again in 1953. The resulting Court decision overturned the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal,” agreeing that students’ self-esteem was harmed by the mere fact of segregation. While the decision applied only to segregation in public education, it set the stage for the civil rights movement. Marshall prevailed in 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

In 1957, LDF, led by Marshall, became an entirely separate entity from the NAACP with its own leadership and board of directors and has remained a separate organization to this day.

Marshall constantly traveled to small, dusty, scorching courtrooms throughout the South at one point, overseeing as many as 450 simultaneous cases. Among other major victories, he successfully challenged whites-only primary elections in Texas in addition to a case in which the Supreme Court declared that restrictive covenants that barred Black people from buying or renting homes could not be enforced in state courts. He eventually became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed him solicitor general in 1965 (the first African-American to hold this position). In 1967 President Johnson created an opening on the Supreme Court by choosing for his attorney general Ramsey Clark, the son of Associate Justice Tom Clark. Justice Clark resigned from the Court to avoid conflicts of interest, and the president appointed Marshall to fill his seat. Marshall is said to have remarked, “I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.” At heart a New Deal liberal, Marshall demonstrated an unwavering commitment to universal civil rights and civil liberties. He was a staunch opponent of the death penalty and a dedicated civil libertarian. No justice was more consistent in opposing government regulation of speech or private sexual conduct. As the Court became more conservative in his final years and he found himself in the liberal minority, he wrote, “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decision making.” He retired in 1991.

As a Supreme Court Justice, he became increasingly dismayed and disappointed as the court’s majority retreated from remedies he felt were necessary to address remnants of Jim Crow. In his Bakke dissent, he wrote: “In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. To fail to do so is to ensure that America will forever remain a divided society.” In particular, Marshall fervently dissented in cases in which the Supreme Court upheld death sentences; he wrote over 150 opinions dissenting from cases in which the Court refused to hear death penalty appeals. Among Marshall’s salient majority opinions for the Supreme Court were: Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza, in 1968, which determined that a mall was a “public forum” and unable to exclude picketers; Stanley v. Georgia, in 1969, held that pornography, when owned privately, could not be prosecuted. “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”; and Bounds v. Smith, which held that state prison systems must provide their inmates with “adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law.”

Marshall did not wish to retire—he frequently said “I was appointed to a life term, and I intend to serve it”—but he had been in ill health for many years, and Brennan’s retirement in 1990 left him unhappy and isolated on the Court. The 82-year-old justice announced on June 27, 1991, that he would retire. When asked at a press conference what was wrong with him that would cause him to leave the Court, he replied: “What’s wrong with me? I’m old. I’m getting old and coming apart!”

President George H. W. Bush (whom Marshall loathed) nominated Clarence Thomas, a conservative who had served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, to replace Marshall. His retirement took effect on October 1.

Marshall served as a visiting judge on the Second Circuit for a week in January 1992, and he received the American Bar Association’s highest award in August of that year.  His health continued to deteriorate, and, on January 25, 1993, at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, he died of heart failure. He was 84 years old.

Marshall lay in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court , and thousands thronged there to pay their respects; more than four thousand attended his funeral service at the National Cathedral. The civil rights leader Vernon E. Jordan said that Marshall had “demonstrat[ed] that the law could be an instrument of liberation”, while Chief Justice William Rehnquist gave a eulogy in which he said: “Inscribed above the front entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words ‘Equal justice under law’. Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall.” Marshall was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

After Marshall’s death in 1993, the Court approved a special resolution honoring Marshall. “The great majority of Supreme Court Justices are almost always remembered for their contributions to constitutional law as a member of this Court. Justice Marshall, however, is unique because of his contributions to constitutional law before becoming a member of the Court were so significant,” wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist. “Inscribed above the front entrance to this Court building are the words, ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’ Surely no individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall.”

Cecilia Marshall, wife of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dies at 94. Like her husband, Marshall had worked for the NAACP in the 1940s and ’50s. She was born in Hawaii and moved to New York, where she became a stenographer, according to details of her early life provided by the court. No cause of death was given.

Born Cecilia Suyat in 1928 in Pu’unene, Maui, in Hawaii, she would later move to New York City, where she took night classes at Columbia University to become a stenographer. She worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1948-1955.

Thurgood Marshall, before joining the bench in 1967, led the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In that position, he was chief counsel for the series of cases that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine in public schools.

The couple married in December 1955 and had two sons, Thurgood Jr. and John.

Cecilia Marshall, who lived in Falls Church, Virginia, served over the years on the board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Supreme Court Historical Society. The Supreme Court public information office said she was also active in church activities and community service. In addition to her two sons, she is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

His Legacy

The Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, was renamed in Marshall’s honor in 2001. Marshall has received numerous tributes. The state of Maryland renamed Baltimore’s airport the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in 2005, and the University of Maryland’s law library is named in his honor. Buildings named for Marshall include New York’s 590-foot-high Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse (renamed in 2001), where he heard cases as an appellate judge, and the federal judicial center in Washington. He is the namesake of streets and schools throughout the nation. Marshall posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1993,  and the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s June 13, 1967 nomination of civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, the National Archives in Washington, DC will display a facsimile of the nomination and Justice Marshall’s opinion in the landmark affirmative action case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of considering race in college admissions decisions. The documents were on display from June 8 – July 26, 2017.

In 2003. He was depicted by Sidney Poitier in the 1991 television movie Separate but Equal, by Laurence Fishburne in George Stevens Jr.’s Broadway play Thurgood,, and by Chadwick Boseman in the 2017 film Marshall.

There will also be Renovations to former public school of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, P.S. #103, set for completion in late 2023