Marshall, Thurgood

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) successfully led the legal team in Brown v. Board of Education for Black plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court where the Court in 1954 declared racial segregation of public education unconstitutional. Marshall was born July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died January 24, 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland, at age 84. He grew up in Baltimore in a middleclass home and attended Black schools and universities: Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in American Literature and Philosophy in 1930, and law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1933, Marshall graduated from law school first in his class and passed the Maryland bar that same year. He was mentored in law school by the dean and chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Charles Hamilton Houston, a distinguished Black attorney. Houston had finished first in his class at Amherst College and was a member of the Law Review at Harvard Law School.

Thurgood Marshall is most famous for successfully directing and arguing the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, but there were other accomplishments after Brown. In 1965, he became the first Black attorney to be appointed U.S. solicitor general, the nation's highest ranking lawyer. As solicitor general, Marshall won 14 of 19 cases argued during his 2-year tenure in that position. In 1967, he was the first Black to become a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he authored many majority and minority opinions for the Court.

In 1935, Marshall began the road to Brown by joining his law school mentor Houston at the NAACP as assistant legal counsel. His major cases in the early 1930s involved teacher salary equalization cases in states with segregated school systems, voting rights cases, and equal funding for Black schools. Marshall won several cases in the southern and border states outlawing segregation in graduate and professional programs in White universities. His first legal brief occurred in law school when he assisted with a 1932 case against the University of North Carolina. This and other cases against segregated higher education set the stage for his legal strategy to eliminate racially segregated schools. In 1938, Marshall replaced his mentor Charles Houston as chief counsel for the NAACP, and in 1939, he established a separate organization for the NAACP to handle legal issues, the Legal Defense and Education Fund, and became its director.

In 1929, upon graduation from Lincoln University, Marshall applied for admission to the University of Maryland Law School but was refused admission because of his race. He later successful litigated a case that integrated the Maryland law school. Marshall directed the Legal Defense and Education Fund for 21 years, argued 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and assisted with 11 other cases. He developed the strategy to end racial segregation under the law. He often declined cases involving legal segregation in other areas to focus exclusively on segregation in education.

No single individual has had a more profound and positive impact on American juris prudence in the Supreme Court's history than Thurgood Marshall. Marshall, almost single-handedly, improved democracy in America by his long and determined battle to rid the country of legally enforced racially segregated public education. The Brown decision led to elimination of racial segregation in other areas of America's life such as public transportation, movie theaters, restaurants, and parks. But Marshall saw education as the centerpiece of his strategy for improving the life chances for African Americans and at the same time provided the world with a more positive image of America.

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