Thurgood Marshall
"Governmentally enforced segregation and governmentally imposed
discrimination ... will be off the books in the foreseeable future."
The great-grandson of a slave, Thurgood Marshall was born in
Baltimore in 1908. After being rejected from the University of
Maryland Law School on account of his race, he was accepted at
all-black Howard University in Washington, D.C. At Howard, he
studied under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H.
Houston and in 1933 graduated first in his class. In 1936, he joined
the legal division of the NAACP, of which Houston was director, and
two years later succeeded his mentor in the organization's top legal
post. As the NAACP's chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, he argued more
than a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully
challenging racial segregation, most notably in public education. He
won nearly all these cases, including a groundbreaking victory in
1954's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the Supreme
Court ruled that segregation violated the equal rights clause of the
14th Amendment to the Constitution and was thus illegal. The
decision served as a great impetus for the civil rights movement and
ultimately led to the abolishment of segregation in all public
facilities and accommodations.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S.
Court of Appeals, and in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed him
to be solicitor general of the United States. Two years later,
Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court. Confirmed by the Senate
by a vote of 69 to 11, Marshall took his seat as the country's first
African American Supreme Court justice on October 2, 1967. |
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During his 24 years on the high court,
Associate Justice Marshall consistently challenged discrimination based
on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and vehemently defended
affirmative action. He supported the rights of criminal defendants and
defended the right to privacy. As appointments by a largely Republican
White House changed the ideology of the Supreme Court, Marshall found
his liberal views increasingly in the minority. He retired in 1991
because of declining health. He died in 1993. |
