Thurgood Marshall

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Lore & Background

Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Norma and William Canfield Marshall. His father held various jobs as a waiter in hotels, in clubs, and on railroad cars, and his mother was an elementary school teacher. Marshall attended the Colored High and Training School (later Frederick Douglass High School) in Baltimore, graduating in 1925 with honors. He then enrolled at Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania, graduating with honors in 1930 with a bachelor's degree in American literature and philosophy. Unable to attend the all-white University of Maryland Law School, he applied to Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., and was admitted. At Howard, he was mentored by Charles Hamilton Houston, who taught his students to be "social engineers" willing to use the law to fight for civil rights. Marshall graduated in June 1933 ranked first in his class, and he passed the Maryland bar examination later that year. Marshall opened a law practice in Baltimore but soon joined Houston at the NAACP in New York. They worked together on the segregation case of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada; after Houston returned to Washington, Marshall took his place as special counsel of the NAACP, and he became director-counsel of the newly formed NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He participated in numerous landmark Supreme Court cases involving civil rights, including Smith v. Allwright, Morgan v. Virginia, Shelley v. Kraemer, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, Sweatt v. Painter, Brown, and Cooper v. Aaron. His approach to desegregation cases emphasized the use of sociological data to show that segregation was inherently unequal. Marshall later said his father "never told me to become a lawyer, but he turned me into one ... He 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."

Reader's Guide

Thurgood Marshall's significance lies in his dual role as a transformative civil rights lawyer and as the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. As an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he won 29 of 32 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, most notably Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. His legal strategy, which used sociological data to demonstrate the inherent inequality of segregation, fundamentally reshaped American constitutional law. Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, Marshall served until 1991. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative. He contributed the "sliding-scale" approach to the Equal Protection Clause, which called on courts to apply a flexible balancing test instead of a more rigid tier-based analysis. He fervently opposed the death penalty, which in his view constituted cruel and unusual punishment; he and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. dissented in more than 1,400 cases in which the majority refused to review a death sentence. He favored a robust interpretation of the First Amendment in decisions such as Stanley v. Georgia, and he supported abortion rights in Roe v. Wade and other cases. His closest ally on the Court was Justice Brennan, and the two voted the same way in most cases. Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas.

Did You Know?

• Marshall won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court.
• He was suspended for two weeks while at Lincoln University after a hazing incident.
• Marshall and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. dissented in more than 1,400 cases where the majority refused to review a death sentence.
• He filed the lawsuit Murray v. Pearson against the University of Maryland in part because he had been barred from attending its law school due to his race.
• Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard University School of Law in June 1933.