Yesterday was the birthday of civil rights activist, lawyer, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, born in 1908 and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall was the plaintiff's attorney in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case (1954), which was instrumental in ending legal racial segregation. He was in this position because he was the founder of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Marshall attended Lincoln College, along with classmates Langston Hughes and Cab Calloway.He wanted to attend law school in his home town at the University of Maryland but did not apply due to the school's segregation policy. Instead, he got his law degree from Howard University Law School.
His first case for the NAACP was Murray v. Pearson, in which he represented Donald Gaines Murray, a black Amherst College graduate with excellent credentials, who was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of its segregation policy. Black students in Maryland wanting to study law had to attend segregated establishments, Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or out-of-state black institutions. Using the strategy developed by Nathan Margold, Marshall argued that Maryland's segregation policy violated the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson because the state did not provide a comparable educational opportunity at a state-run black institution. The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled against the state of Maryland and its Attorney General, who represented the University of Maryland, stating, "Compliance with the Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the state. Whatever system is adopted for legal education must furnish equality of treatment now."
His most famous case for the NAACP was Brown vs. Board of Education, which challenged the doctrine of “separate but equal,” Thurgood Marshall said, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.” On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which changed the landscape of American education forever, and finally drove a stake through the heart of Plessy v. Ferguson.
President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961 to a new seat created on May 19, 1961, by 75 Stat. 80. A group of Senators from the South, led by Mississippi's James Eastland, held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a recess appointment. Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to be the United States Solicitor General, the first African American to hold the office. At the time, this made him the highest-ranking black government official in American history, surpassing Robert C. Weaver, Johnson's first secretary of housing and urban development. As Solicitor General, he won 14 out of the 19 cases that he argued for the government.
Marshall was the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court (1967). He once bluntly described his legal philosophy as "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up", a statement which his conservative detractors argued was a sign of his embracement of judicial activism.
Marshall served on the Court for the next 24 years, compiling a liberal record that included strong support for Constitutional protection of individual rights, especially the rights of criminal suspects. His most frequent ally on the Court (the pair rarely voted at odds) was Justice William Brennan, who consistently joined him in supporting abortion rights and opposing the death penalty. Brennan and Marshall concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled four years later that the death penalty was constitutional in some circumstances. Thereafter, Brennan or Marshall dissented from every denial of certiorari in a capital case and from every decision upholding a sentence of death.
Marshall died of heart failure at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, at 2:58 pm on January 24, 1993, at the age of 84. After he lay in repose in the Great Hall of the United States Supreme Court Building, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In the aftermath of his death, one obituary read, “We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall.”
He was replaced on the Court by Clarence Thomas.
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