Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall, the country’s first African American appointed a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, served in that tribunal for 24 years, between 1967 until he retired in 1991. Yet, his accomplishments in the years before joining the Supreme Court probably had a greater impact on America than the near quarter-century he sat on the nation’s highest tribunal.
Born in Baltimore in 1908, the son of a railway porter father and a teacher mother, his parents instilled in him a deep reverence for the United States Constitution and the rule of law.
He graduated from Lincoln University, where his classmates included Langston Hughes and Cab Calloway. He sought to attend the University of Maryland’s school of law, which was the closest one to his home, but it barred blacks. So he went to Howard University in Washington, DC, instead, and his mother had to pawn her wedding ring to pay his entry fees.
Graduating first in his class from Howard University’s law school in 1933, Thurgood Marshall took aim at the system of legal segregation and the “separate but equal” doctrine upon which it rested and set off on a crusade to overturn both.
In charge of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Marshall coordinated its legal strategy with a series of strategic lawsuits to highlight the unconstitutionality of racial segregation. A gifted attorney, between 1938 and 1961, as the NAACP’s top lawyer, he argued 32 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them, including landmark legal victories that resulted in, e.g.; the outlawing of racially restrictive real estate covenants; the integration of the University of Texas; and the outlawing of whites-only political party primaries. The legal campaign culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the seminal Supreme Court case that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine, began the process of dismantling racial segregation and laid the legal foundation upon which the civil rights movement rested.
Indeed, it has been argued that while Martin Luther King had been the spiritual leader of the civil rights movement, Thurgood Marshall, who had been battling Jim Crow in court for decades before King, could be described as the movement’s general.
After joining the Supreme Court, Marshall, who once described his legal philosophy as “You do what you think is right, and let the law catch up“, compiled a liberal record, especially on matters of individual rights. However, his legacy and impact on the bench never equaled his legacy and impact from the decades he had spent as a lawyer arguing cases before courts. As the Supreme Court moved steadily rightwards and became more conservative over the years, Marshall found himself writing dissents on civil rights cases more often than he got to author majority opinions.
Thurgood Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and died in 1993, aged 84. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 5, Grave 40-3.