Thurgood Marshall

Thoroughgood Marshall — who shortened his name to Thurgood at the age of seven — was born on the second of July 1908 at Baltimore, Maryland, the younger of two sons of William Canfield Marshall — a railway porter and country-club steward who had completed the eighth grade — and Norma Arica Williams Marshall, an elementary-school teacher who held the bachelor's from the Coppin Normal School of Baltimore. He was educated at the segregated Frederick Douglass High School of Baltimore and at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he took the bachelor's in 1930.

He applied to the University of Maryland School of Law in 1929 and was refused on grounds of race. He attended instead the Howard University School of Law from 1930 to 1933 under the deanship of Charles Hamilton Houston (placed in this archive), graduating first in his class. He filed in 1933 his first major case — Murray v. Pearson — under Houston's supervision against the same Maryland School of Law that had refused his application, winning a 1936 unanimous decision from the Maryland Court of Appeals that desegregated the institution.

He succeeded Charles Hamilton Houston in 1938 as chief counsel of the NAACP and in 1940 became the founding director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund — the institution he founded and would across the following twenty-one years build into the principal civil-rights litigation organisation in the world. He argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and won twenty-nine — the highest victory rate of any Supreme Court advocate in the twentieth century. His decisive cases include Smith v. Allwright (1944, ending the white primary), Shelley v. Kraemer (1948, ending racial-covenant enforcement), Sweatt v. Painter (1950, integrating the University of Texas Law School), McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), and the consolidated five cases of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson.

President John Kennedy nominated him in 1961 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. President Lyndon Johnson appointed him Solicitor General of the United States in 1965 — the first African American to hold the office — and nominated him on the thirteenth of June 1967 to the Supreme Court of the United States. He was confirmed and sworn in on the second of October 1967. He served on the Supreme Court for twenty-four years until his retirement on the second of October 1991.

He died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the twenty-fourth of January 1993, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as the first Black Supreme Court Justice.