Thurgood Marshall

Thoroughgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Norma Arica Williams, a teacher at Henry Highland Garnet Elementary School, and William Canfield Marshall, a Pullman Company dining-car waiter and later a steward at the Gibson Island Club. His paternal great-grandfather had been brought to the United States as an enslaved African. His mother's family included a grandfather who had served in the Union Army. By the second grade he had asked the school to record his name as Thurgood, because Thoroughgood took too long to write.

He attended Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, graduating in 1925 at sixteen. He enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest historically Black college in the country. He sang in the glee club. He was a year behind Langston Hughes. He graduated in 1930 with honors in American literature and philosophy. He applied to the University of Maryland School of Law. The school wrote back that the university did not admit Black students. He was twenty-two.

He enrolled at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. The dean was Charles Hamilton Houston, a Harvard Law graduate and World War I veteran who had taken over the school in 1929 and set out to convert it into a training ground for civil rights lawyers. Houston told his students that a lawyer who was not a social engineer was a parasite on society. Marshall took every class Houston taught. He graduated first in his class in 1933.

He opened a private practice in Baltimore in 1933 at the height of the Depression. His first paying client owed him money. His second paying client owed him more. He took whatever cases came through the door and worked NAACP civil rights cases without fee. In 1935, Houston brought him into the NAACP's national legal apparatus part time. Their first major target was the law school that had turned Marshall away five years earlier.

In 1935, Donald Gaines Murray, a Black Amherst College graduate, applied to the University of Maryland School of Law and was rejected. Marshall and Houston filed Murray v. Pearson on his behalf in state court. In January 1936, the Baltimore City Court ordered Maryland to admit Murray. The Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed in 1936. It was the first major court victory in a civil rights case Marshall had argued. Murray graduated from the school in 1938. Marshall never lost his satisfaction at that outcome.

In 1936, Houston brought Marshall onto the NAACP's national legal staff in New York full time. When Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall succeeded him as chief counsel. In 1940, he organized the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as a separate 501(c)(3) tax entity, which he would lead as director-counsel for the next twenty-one years. He drove between fifty and sixty thousand miles a year through the South, arguing cases in state courts, federal district courts, and circuit courts of appeal.

Before Brown, there was the arithmetic of winning one graduate school at a time. Sipuel v. Board of Regents (1948), the University of Oklahoma's law school. Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the University of Texas Law School. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), the University of Oklahoma's graduate education department. Each case narrowed the definition of separate but equal a little further. In Sweatt, Chief Justice Vinson wrote that the separate Black law school Texas had hastily created could not match the intangibles of the white school. It was the hole that Brown walked through.

The strategy converged in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The LDF consolidated five school cases from Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. Marshall was lead counsel. His team included Constance Baker Motley, Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, William Hastie, and William Coleman. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll studies, showing that Black children consistently preferred the white doll, were introduced as social science evidence. Marshall argued the case in two sessions, December 1952 and December 1953.

On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read the opinion from the bench. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Nine to zero. Marshall was standing in the Supreme Court's press room when the decision came down. He was forty-five years old. He had been working the legal strategy that led to that morning for more than twenty years. He said later that his first thought was of Charles Houston, who had died four years earlier and had not lived to see it.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Southern Democrats held the nomination up for eleven months before confirming him. He served on that court for four years and wrote ninety-eight majority opinions, none of which was overturned on appeal. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to become the 33rd Solicitor General of the United States. He accepted, took a pay cut, and argued nineteen cases for the government before the Supreme Court in two years. He won fourteen.

On June 13, 1967, Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court, telling the country that it was the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place. The Senate Judiciary Committee delayed the hearing for two and a half months. Southern senators asked him trivia questions about the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment, trying to embarrass him into a misstep. He answered them. The Senate confirmed him on August 30, 1967, by a vote of sixty-nine to eleven. He was sworn in on October 2, 1967, at the age of fifty-nine.

He served on the Supreme Court for twenty-four years. He wrote the majority opinion in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), protecting private possession of material from state intrusion in the home. He wrote for the Court in Bounds v. Smith (1977), establishing prisoners' right of access to the courts. As the Court turned more conservative in the 1980s he wrote dissent after dissent, including his dissent in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989) and his final dissent in Payne v. Tennessee (1991). Those opinions are now standard reading in constitutional law. He retired on October 1, 1991. He died on January 24, 1993, at Bethesda Naval Hospital.