Thurgood Marshall was the architect of the legal campaign that dismantled the constitutional foundation of Jim Crow. As the NAACP’s chief lawyer he argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court and won most of them, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954); he then served as a federal appeals judge, as Solicitor General, and, from 1967 to 1991, as the first Black Justice of the Supreme Court.
At a Glance
- Born
- 2 July 1908, Baltimore, Maryland
- Died
- 24 January 1993, Bethesda, Maryland
- Birth name
- Thoroughgood Marshall
- Known for
- Brown v. Board of Education (1954); founding director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; U.S. Solicitor General; Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1967–1991)
- HBCU ties
- Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) (Bachelor’s degree, 1930); Howard University (Law degree, graduated first in his class, 1933)
- Fields
- Law · Civil Rights · Politics
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Marshall was born in Baltimore on 2 July 1908 to William Canfield Marshall, a railroad porter who later worked as a steward at a whites-only club, and Norma Williams Marshall, a schoolteacher. He was named Thoroughgood, after a grandfather, and by his own account shortened the name in the second grade because it was too long to spell. He attended Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School.
He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930. In 1929 he married Vivian “Buster” Burey. Barred by race from the University of Maryland School of Law in his home city, he enrolled at Howard University School of Law in Washington, where the vice dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, was turning the school into a training ground for civil rights litigators. Marshall graduated first in his class in 1933 and opened a law practice in Baltimore.
Life and Work
Marshall’s first major civil rights victory came against the law school that had turned him away. With Houston, he represented Donald Gaines Murray, a Black Amherst graduate refused admission to the University of Maryland School of Law; in Pearson v. Murray (1936) Maryland’s highest court ordered Murray admitted. Marshall joined the national NAACP legal staff in New York in 1936 under Houston and succeeded him as chief counsel in 1938.
In 1940 Marshall founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and served as its director-counsel until 1961. He travelled thousands of miles through the South defending Black clients in criminal cases, often at personal risk, while pursuing a deliberate, case-by-case strategy against segregation. He won Smith v. Allwright (1944), which struck down the Texas white primary, and took part in the restrictive-covenant litigation that produced Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). In Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (both 1950) the Court held that the separate graduate and professional schools offered Black students were unequal.
Those cases laid the ground for a direct assault on the doctrine of “separate but equal” itself. Marshall led the LDF team that consolidated school cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia; he argued before the Court in 1952 and again in 1953. On 17 May 1954 a unanimous Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the commonly cited count, Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court as an advocate. His first wife died in 1955, and later that year he married Cecilia Suyat, a secretary at the NAACP.
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy named Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; Southern senators delayed his confirmation until September 1962. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General, the government’s chief advocate before the Supreme Court. On 13 June 1967 Johnson nominated him to succeed Justice Tom C. Clark, and on 30 August 1967 the Senate confirmed him by a vote of 69 to 11.
Marshall served on the Court for twenty-four years. He was a consistent vote for broad protection of civil rights and civil liberties, for affirmative action, and for the rights of criminal defendants, and he held that the death penalty was unconstitutional in all circumstances, a position he set out in a concurring opinion in Furman v. Georgia (1972) and restated in dissent after the Court permitted executions to resume. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) he wrote separately to defend race-conscious admissions, recounting at length the history of state-sanctioned discrimination against Black Americans. As the Court grew more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote an increasing share of its dissents. In a 1987 lecture marking the Constitution’s bicentennial, he argued that the document as written in 1787 had been “defective from the start” and that its meaning had been made through later struggle and amendment. He announced his retirement on 27 June 1991 and left the bench that autumn; President George H. W. Bush named Clarence Thomas to succeed him.
Legacy
Marshall died of heart failure at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on 24 January 1993, at the age of eighty-four. His body lay in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court, and he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously later in 1993. The University of Maryland law library bears his name, and in 2005 Baltimore’s airport was renamed Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
Historians treat the LDF campaign Marshall led as a model of public-interest litigation: a sustained, decades-long program that used carefully chosen test cases to move constitutional doctrine. His papers, opened at the Library of Congress after his death, document both that strategy and his years on the Court. The LDF he founded continues to litigate voting, education, and criminal-justice cases.
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s lawyers dismantled the legal foundation of Jim Crow through a patient, case-by-case strategy that used the Constitution’s own promises against segregation. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 2 July 1908 Born in Baltimore, Maryland.
- 1933 Graduates first in his class from Howard University School of Law.
- 1936 With Charles Hamilton Houston, wins Pearson v. Murray, desegregating the University of Maryland School of Law.
- 1940 Founds the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and becomes its director-counsel.
- 1944 Wins Smith v. Allwright, outlawing the Texas white primary.
- 17 May 1954 Supreme Court decides Brown v. Board of Education.
- 1961 Named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; confirmed in September 1962.
- 1965 Appointed Solicitor General of the United States.
- 30 August 1967 Confirmed as the first Black Justice of the Supreme Court.
- 24 January 1993 Dies in Bethesda, Maryland; buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Sources and Further Reading
- Federal Judicial Center, “Marshall, Thurgood,” Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges. Link
- Maryland State Archives, “Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993),” Archives of Maryland Biographical Series. Link
- NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “Thurgood Marshall.” Link
- Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (New York: Times Books, 1998).
- Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976).
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