Thurgood Marshall

Supreme Court Justice

• Born: July 2, 1908
• Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: January 24, 1993
• Place of death: Bethesda, Maryland

Lawyer, judge, and Supreme Court justice

Marshall had a long and distinguished career as an attorney representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and as a federal judge. His nomination as a Supreme Court justice in 1967 marked the first appointment of an African American to sit on the highest court in the United States.

Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Government and politics; Law

Early Life

Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. His ancestors included a great-grandfather who was a slave in Maryland in the mid-nineteenth century. Marshall’s paternal grandfather fought as a freedman in the Union Army. The grandfather took the name Thoroughgood, which was later given to Marshall. At seventeen, Marshall entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black school. After graduation, he began attending Howard University Law School in 1931. His application to the University of Maryland Law School was rejected, presumably on racial grounds.

Marshall was deeply influenced by Howard’s president, Charles Hamilton Houston. One of Houston’s goals was to challenge the principle of “separate but equal” education for African Americans, an aim that would be realized—with a direct contribution by Marshall himself—some twenty years later. Marshall graduated magna cum laude with his law degree in 1933. As a young lawyer in his twenties, Marshall gained national attention when he won a court case that granted a black student admission to the same law school that had turned Marshall himself down, the University of Maryland.

Life’s Work

In 1936, Marshall became a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1940, he won his first victory before the Supreme Court (Chambers v. Florida, a case that reversed the convictions of three African American men charged with murder of a white man). This was the first of twenty-nine Supreme Court cases that he would win before becoming a judge himself.

Marshall’s writings during these years reflect his dedication to equal rights for all racial groups. His 1939 article “Equal Justice Under the Law” appeared in The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP. During World War II, the Lawyers Guild Review published his article calling for direct governmental action to stop discrimination against African Americans. Similarly, during the Korean War, Marshall wrote (again in The Crisis) about discriminatory practices involving African American servicemen in zones of combat.

Marshall’s role in the watershed 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools, established his importance in the Civil Rights movement. Seven years elapsed before his potential as a federal judge was to be recognized. After Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall continued to express his views on how its integration goals should be handled. From the outset, he supported gradual implementation. In the first months of 1956, however, a faction in Congress (spearheaded by southern legislators) challenged the Supreme Court’s use of its constitutional authority. Marshall took his defense of the 1954 ruling into the very southern areas that were resisting integration. At a North Carolina rally of the NAACP, he reaffirmed that, although circumstances in each local setting would require local negotiations on how integration would be achieved, there was to be no question that it would be achieved.

Opponents of integrated schools still tried to rally resistance to the 1954 ruling. Some contended that integrated schools would lead to an increase in marriages between African Americans and whites. Marshall’s counterpoint was that marriage—unlike tax-supported education—was a matter of personal choice, over which legislators and judges had little say. Although controversy continued, Marshall had some satisfaction when, in its 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court declared laws prohibiting racial intermarriage unconstitutional. By that time, Marshall had joined the federal judiciary, first as a circuit court judge and then, in the very year of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court itself.

President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit in New York in 1961. For four years, Marshall served as an appellate judge until Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, appointed him U.S. solicitor general. During his service in this post, Marshall won fourteen of nineteen cases in which he served as representative of the government. It is widely believed that Johnson viewed this appointment as an interim step toward history-making integration in all levels of education and government: the appointment of the first African American to the Supreme Court.

After being nominated by Johnson, Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court was confirmed on August 30, 1967. Although the Senate vote showed strong support (sixty-nine in favor, eleven opposed), the confirmation process was considerably more drawn out than the two previous confirmations of Arthur Goldberg and Abe Fortas.

Marshall’s early years on the Supreme Court aligned him with the then-majority liberal wing: Chief Justice Earl Warren and justices William Brennan, William Douglas, and Fortas. Until the years of the Nixon presidency ushered in a conservative reorientation of the Supreme Court, Marshall was able to maintain his reputation for liberal-leaning positions. Marshall’s vote helped bring about victories for liberal causes during the 1960’s. These included First Amendment freedom of speech issues and cases supporting protection of the underprivileged.

As late as 1989, Marshall continued to encourage jurists to recognize that racial equality and civil rights remained a major challenge for their profession. In his remarks before the Second Circuit Judicial Conference, a speech titled “The Future of Civil Rights,” Marshall drew attention to the need for conscious cooperation between the legislative and judicial branches in pursuing civil rights legislation and protecting ground gained over the previous two and a half decades.

A major issue that may have influenced Marshall’s decision to retire from the Supreme Court in 1991 was the longstanding debate over the death penalty. In a number of cases before the court, Marshall had registered his opposition to capital punishment. He was particularly disturbed by procedures (which varied from state to state) governing last-minute stays of execution. What might have been a crowning blow was his dissenting vote in a capital punishment case (Payne v. Tennessee) delivered on June 27, 1991, the very day that Marshall announced his retirement. Marshall died less than two years later, on January 24, 1993.

Significance

Marshall stands as an important symbol of the Civil Rights movement within the judicial system. He made a major stand for integration as the chief counsel for the NAACP and lead attorney in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Later, he personally integrated the Supreme Court. His work had a far-reaching impact on American society throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

Bibliography

Ball, Howard. A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America. New York: Crown, 1998. Well-documented, authoritative biography of Marshall, organized by issues, including civil rights, affirmative action, First Amendment freedoms, and discrimination in the U.S. military.

Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Focuses on Marshall’s involvement as an attorney representing African American interests in defining and defending civil rights.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Offers a review of Marshall’s position on several major issues, such as school desegregation and capital punishment, while on the Supreme Court.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001. This collection of primary documents (and a personal interview done in 1977), some aimed at the broader public and published in journals, others delivered before an audience of peers in the legal profession, covers a wide range of issues.