Thurgood Marshall

• 1. Introduction

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  Thurgood Marshall walked into the Supreme Court as an advocate 32 times and walked out a winner 29 of those times. That record alone would make him one of the most consequential lawyers in American history. But Marshall did not stop there. On the 2nd of October 1967, he took the oath of office as an associate justice of that same Court, becoming the first African American ever to hold that seat. He would serve for nearly twenty-four years. The questions worth sitting with are these: how does a boy from Baltimore, barred from the nearest law school because of his race, become the attorney who dismantles the legal architecture of segregation? And once he reaches the Court, what happens when the institution he fought to shape begins moving in the other direction?

• 2. Baltimore Roots

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  Thurgood Marshall was born on the 2nd of July 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Norma and William Canfield Marshall. His father worked as a waiter in hotels, clubs, and on railroad cars; his mother taught elementary school. The family briefly relocated to New York City after his birth, then returned to Baltimore when he was six. William Marshall had an unusual hobby: he loved following legal cases, and he brought young Thurgood along to courtrooms to watch. Marshall later said his father "never told me to become a lawyer, but he turned me into one," explaining that William "taught me how to argue, challenged my logic on every point, by making me prove every statement I made, even if we were discussing the weather."

  At the Colored High and Training School in Baltimore, Marshall graduated with honors in 1925. He enrolled at Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania, described as the oldest college for African Americans in the United States. His classmates there included the poet Langston Hughes. Marshall was suspended for two weeks over a hazing incident, but he also led the school's debating team to repeated victories and graduated with honors in 1930 with a degree in American literature and philosophy. When he sought a legal education, the University of Maryland Law School was closed to him because of his race. He applied instead to Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. The mentor he found there would shape the rest of his career.

• 3. The Making of a Lawyer

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  Charles Hamilton Houston ran the Howard University School of Law with a specific mission. He trained his students to be, in his own words, "social engineers" willing to use the law as a vehicle to fight for civil rights. Marshall absorbed that lesson completely. He graduated in June 1933 ranked first in his class and passed the Maryland bar examination later that year.

  His first law practice in Baltimore was not financially successful, partly because Marshall spent much of his time on community work rather than paying clients. He volunteered with the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, and in 1935 he and Houston filed suit against the University of Maryland on behalf of Donald Gaines Murray, an African American whose application to the law school had been rejected on racial grounds. Judge Eugene O'Dunne ordered Murray admitted. Marshall later said he had filed the lawsuit "to get even with the bastards" who had barred him from the same institution years earlier.

  In 1936, Marshall joined Houston in New York as his assistant at the NAACP. Together they worked on Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, a 1938 case in which Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that if Missouri provided whites the opportunity to attend law school in-state, it was required to do the same for Black students. When Houston returned to Washington that year, Marshall assumed his role as special counsel. He also became director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he was responsible not only for arguing cases but for raising money, managing staff, and handling public relations. By 1945, he had won salary-equity cases in major Southern cities, ending pay disparities for African-American teachers and government workers across the region.

• 4. Road to Brown

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  In the years after 1945, Marshall shifted his focus toward segregated schools, developing a strategy that centered on the inherent educational harm of segregation rather than just the physical differences between Black and white facilities. The Court ruled in his favor in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in 1948, ordering that Oklahoma provide Ada Lois Sipuel with a legal education. In 1950, Marshall brought two cases to the Court on the same day: McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, challenging unequal treatment at the University of Oklahoma's graduate school, and Sweatt v. Painter, challenging a Texas law that required Black students to attend a separate law school. The Court ruled for both plaintiffs.

  The cases converging in Brown v. Board of Education arrived from Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia. Marshall helped try the South Carolina case, calling social scientists as witnesses, including psychology professor Ken Clark, who testified that segregation caused self-hatred among African-American students and inflicted damage "likely to endure as long as the conditions of segregation exist". The five cases were argued in December 1952. Marshall's adversary was John W. Davis, a former solicitor general and presidential candidate known for his oratorical skills. Marshall spoke plainly. He told the Court that the only possible justification for segregation "is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as possible."

  On the 17th of May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision written by Chief Justice Earl Warren: "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." When Marshall heard those words read aloud, he said later, "I was so happy I was numb." The Court's follow-up ruling in Brown II, in 1955, ordered desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed" but set no concrete deadline. Marshall had argued for full integration to be completed by September 1956. The refusal to set a firm date disappointed him, but the fight was far from over; he returned to the Court in Cooper v. Aaron in 1958 to argue successfully against Little Rock's attempt to delay integration.

• 5. From Bench to Bench

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  President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on the 23rd of September 1961. The circuit spanned New York, Vermont, and Connecticut and was regarded as the nation's leading appellate court at the time. Southern senators delayed Marshall's full confirmation for more than eight months, with a subcommittee holding hearings between May and August 1962 while subjecting him to what one scholar described as questioning on "marginal issues at best". Senator Kenneth Keating of New York charged that the two pro-segregation Southern Democrats on the subcommittee were engaging in unjustifiable delay. The full Judiciary Committee bypassed the subcommittee and endorsed the nomination by an 11-4 vote on September 7; the full Senate confirmed him 56-14 on the 11th of September 1962.

  On the Second Circuit, Marshall authored 98 majority opinions, none of which the Supreme Court reversed. His dissents there consistently favored broader readings of constitutional protections than his colleagues chose. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as Solicitor General, and he won fourteen of the nineteen Supreme Court cases he argued in that role. Marshall later called the position "the most effective job" and "maybe the best" job he ever had. Among those cases, he defended the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in two separate Supreme Court arguments, winning both.

• 6. A Justice in Dissent

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  Johnson announced Marshall's Supreme Court nomination in the White House Rose Garden on the 13th of June 1967, declaring that Marshall "deserves the appointment... I believe that it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Senators including Mississippi's James O. Eastland, North Carolina's Sam Ervin Jr., and South Carolina's Strom Thurmond opposed the nomination; Time magazine described Thurmond's questioning as a "Yahoo-type hazing." The Judiciary Committee recommended confirmation by an 11-5 vote on August 3; the full Senate confirmed him 69-11 on August 30. He took the constitutional oath of office on the 2nd of October 1967.

  During the liberal Warren Court years, Marshall was typically in the majority and wrote few landmark opinions due to his lack of seniority. Four Supreme Court appointments by President Richard Nixon changed that. As the Court grew more conservative under Chief Justice Warren Burger, Marshall found himself dissenting with growing frequency. His closest ally on the Court was Justice William J. Brennan Jr.; the two agreed so often that their law clerks privately called them "Justice Brennanmarshall." Marshall described Chief Justice Warren, who had retired before the Nixon appointments reshaped the Court, as "probably the greatest Chief Justice who ever lived."

  Marshall's most influential contribution to constitutional doctrine was the "sliding-scale" approach to the Equal Protection Clause, which called on courts to weigh a law's goals against its impact on affected groups rather than apply a rigid tier-based test. In what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein described as Marshall's greatest opinion, he dissented in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, arguing that funding local schools primarily through property taxes unconstitutionally disadvantaged students in poorer districts. Although the sliding-scale approach was never adopted by the full Court, the legal scholar Susan Low Bloch wrote that Marshall's consistent advocacy appeared to have pushed the Court toward greater flexibility over time.

  Marshall and Brennan dissented together in more than 1,400 cases in which the majority declined to review a death sentence. Their dissents in those cases followed a fixed text: "Adhering to our views that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, we would grant certiorari and vacate the death sentence in this case." In Furman v. Georgia, when the Court struck down then-existing capital-punishment statutes, Marshall wrote that the death penalty "falls upon the poor, the ignorant, and the underprivileged members of society". When the Court in Gregg v. Georgia subsequently upheld revised death-penalty laws, he dissented again, calling capital punishment a "vestigial savagery". He was the only justice on the Court with substantial experience defending people charged with capital crimes, and he often said simply: "Death is so lasting."

  In First Amendment cases, Marshall wrote the 1969 opinion in Stanley v. Georgia holding that states had no power to criminalize the possession of obscene material in one's own home: "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch." He joined the majority in Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which held that burning the American flag was constitutionally protected expression. In privacy cases, the author Carl T. Rowan wrote that "no justice ever supported a woman's right to choice as uncompromisingly as Marshall did"; he joined the majority in Roe v. Wade and consistently voted against state laws that sought to limit abortion rights. Over nearly twenty-four years on the Court, Marshall participated in more than 3,400 cases and authored 322 majority opinions.

• 7. Legacy and Honors

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  Marshall announced his retirement on the 27th of June 1991, at age 82. He had said for years, "I was appointed to a life term, and I intend to serve it," but years of ill health and the 1990 retirement of Brennan left him, by his own account, unhappy and isolated. Asked at a press conference what was wrong with him, he replied: "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and coming apart!" President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace him.

  Marshall died of heart failure on the 24th of January 1993, at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center at age 84. Thousands came to the Supreme Court's Great Hall where he lay in repose; more than four thousand attended his funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. Civil rights leader Vernon E. Jordan said Marshall had "demonstrated that the law could be an instrument of liberation". Chief Justice William Rehnquist, delivering the eulogy, said: "Inscribed above the front entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words 'Equal justice under law'. Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall." He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  The tributes that followed were wide-ranging. Marshall posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1993. The state of Maryland renamed Baltimore's airport the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in 2005. The Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in New York, standing 590 feet high, was renamed in his honor in 2001. The legal scholar Mark Tushnet, who had clerked for Marshall, called him "probably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century." In 2018, the Episcopal Church made Marshall a permanent saint, with May 17 designated as his feast day to mark the date the Brown decision was handed down.