Marshall, Thurgood (1908–1993)

Arguably, Thurgood Marshall was not only one of the three greatest African American social activists of the 20th century (Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X being the other two), he may also be lauded as one of America's true revolutionaries. The grandson of a slave, Marshall distinguished himself at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1930. As director counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along with his law school professor Charles Houston, Marshall's early litigations were aimed at challenging Plessey v. Ferguson (1896). Plessey's “separate but equal” clause in the Fourteenth Amendment was the legal foundation for segregation in housing, public accommodations, interstate transportation, and most significant, public education. Beginning with Murray v. University of Maryland in 1935, which integrated the University of Maryland School of Law (which had denied Marshall admission in 1930), and culminating with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka of 1954, Marshall's landmark civil rights litigation effectively ended the legal basis for segregation in American public education.

As the architect of strategies for dismantling racial segregation, Marshall extended his advocacy beyond Jim Crow to become a staunch supporter of voiceless Americans of all races. Marshall's fights for the individual rights of the common person included constitutional laws surrounding criminal rights, voting rights, the death penalty, abortion, wire taps and electronic surveillance, and federal aid to the poor. Already guaranteed a vaunted place in American history after Brown, widely considered the single most important Supreme Court ruling of the century, in 1961 Marshall was appointed by President John F. Kennedy as a circuit judge to the U.S. Second Court of Appeals. His 112 rulings from that bench were all later upheld by the Supreme Court. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall U.S. solicitor general, in which position he successfully argued 14 of the 19 cases he presented to the Supreme Court. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1967 by Johnson, Marshall became the first African American to serve in that capacity. During his 24 years on the court, as it continually shifted toward a more conservative stance, Justice Marshall wrote 1,800 dissenting opinions.

Marshall's legacy is controversial. During his early civil rights career, he was lionized as a “race man,” an indefatigable fighter for the rights of the Negro. But as the civil rights movement progressed into the 1960s, Marshall's gradualism—working from within the legal frameworks of the Constitution and Bill of Rights—brought both the NAACP's and his own agendas under increased criticism. Advocates of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s nonviolent mass protests and Stokely Carmichael's, H. Rap Brown's, and Malcolm X's black power militancy became impatient with Marshall's gradualism. Nevertheless, by successfully challenging Plessey v. Ferguson, Marshall provided a legal precedent for dismantling segregation in America. His legacy will always be his unwavering challenges of laws discriminating against the oppressed and powerless.