Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, and later shortened his given name to Thurgood. His father, William Canfield Marshall, worked as a railroad porter and as a steward at a private club; his mother, Norma Arica Williams Marshall, was an elementary-school teacher. Raised in a household that prized education and argument about public affairs, he attended Baltimore’s Colored High and Training School (later Frederick Douglass High School). He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930 and from Howard University School of Law in 1933, finishing first in his class. At Howard he studied under Charles Hamilton Houston, who trained a generation of lawyers to attack racial segregation through the courts. Marshall himself had been denied admission to the University of Maryland School of Law because of race, an experience that shaped his early litigation.

After a short period in private practice in Baltimore, Marshall joined the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became the organization’s principal lawyer and, from 1940, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Over more than two decades he argued a long series of cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, winning the large majority of them. Those cases included challenges to racially exclusive primary elections, racially restrictive housing covenants, and segregated graduate and professional schools, among them Murray v. Pearson, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, Sweatt v. Painter, and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents. The campaign culminated in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), in which the Court held that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961; after a lengthy confirmation struggle he took his seat in 1962. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General of the United States, the first African American to hold that office. In 1967 Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed the nomination, and Marshall became the first African American justice of that Court, serving from 1967 until his retirement in 1991. On the bench he was a consistent advocate of individual rights, due process, and a broad reading of constitutional protections for racial minorities, the poor, and criminal defendants. As the Court’s majority shifted in later years he dissented with increasing frequency, notably on capital punishment, affirmative action, and the scope of equal protection and privacy.

Marshall married Vivian Burey in 1929; she died of cancer in 1955. Later that year he married Cecilia Suyat, with whom he had two sons, Thurgood Marshall Jr. and John W. Marshall. After leaving the Court he lived in retirement until his death on 24 January 1993 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He is widely regarded as one of the most consequential lawyers and jurists in United States history, both for the litigation that helped end de jure segregation and for his twenty-four years on the nation’s highest court.