Marshall, Thurgood (1908–1993)

Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights lawyer and later U.S. Supreme Court associate justice. He was known for his high success rate in cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, most notably Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. The first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, Marshall compiled a liberal record that included support for abortion rights, affirmative action, court-ordered school desegregation, and opposition to the death penalty.

Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. He graduated from the historically Black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania but was discouraged from applying to the University of Maryland Law School because of his race. He attended Howard University Law School, where he studied with the new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston. It was Houston's contention that the key to civil rights for African Americans lay in the development of a cadre of well-trained African American lawyers [Page 547]who could methodically assault segregation and discrimination as enshrined in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which was used as the basis of legalized segregation in virtually all areas of public life by means of a doctrine of “separate but equal” facilities, opportunities, and access.

In 1934, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hired Houston as its special counsel. Upon graduating from law school that year, Marshall joined with Houston in what would be Marshall's first civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, in which the same University of Maryland Law School that had not admitted Marshall was ordered by a state court to admit a Black student. Houston and Marshall won, but the state chose not to appeal the case, which meant that the effects of the decision would not go beyond the state of Maryland.

In 1936, when Marshall joined the NAACP as assistant special counsel, education became the prime target as he and Houston sought cases that could be used to overturn Jim Crow laws. They began to file suits as part of their new Public Education Initiative, a strategic plan that sought equal pay for White and Black teachers with similar qualifications, equality of buildings and equipment, equal per capita funding and expenditure for Blacks and Whites, and equality in graduate and professional training.

In 1945, no southern state university offered the Ph.D. degree for African Americans. There were 37 engineering schools for Whites and none for Blacks, and 2 law schools and 2 medical schools for Blacks, whereas there were 29 White-only law schools and 20 public medical schools that only trained Whites. Therefore, as the NAACP determined its legal strategy, graduate and professional schools were targeted because there was little chance that states could claim that separate but equal schools existed. The hope was that the prohibitive cost of creating new Jim Crow schools would force southern states into integrating their graduate schools. Marshall successfully argued for the integration of the law schools at the Universities of Oklahoma and Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court in Sipuel v. University of Oklahoma (1948) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), respectively. Also, Marshall, whose mother had been a schoolteacher, filed successful suits over unequal teacher salaries in virtually every southern state between 1936 and 1944.

...