Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall
Born	Thoroughgood Marshall 2 7, 1908
Birthplace	Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Died	Template:Death date and age Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Lawyer, jurist
Known for	First African-American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education
Education	Howard University School of Law (LL.B.)
Awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom (1993), Spingarn Medal (1946)

Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the first African American to serve on the nation's highest court. Before ascending to the bench, Marshall spent decades as a leading civil rights attorney, serving as special counsel and later director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In that capacity, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them, including the landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional and overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine that had prevailed since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961, and President Lyndon B. Johnson subsequently named him Solicitor General of the United States in 1965 before nominating him to the Supreme Court in 1967. On the Court, Marshall was a consistent liberal voice who championed individual rights, opposed the death penalty, and developed an influential "sliding-scale" approach to equal protection analysis. He retired in 1991 due to declining health and died on January 24, 1993, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Early Life

Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. He later shortened his first name to "Thurgood" while in elementary school. His father, William Canfield Marshall, worked as a railroad porter and later as a steward at an exclusive all-white country club on the Chesapeake Bay. His mother, Norma Arica Marshall (née Williams), was a schoolteacher. Marshall's family was of African-American descent, and he grew up in a middle-class household in Baltimore's segregated society.

Marshall's father had a significant influence on his intellectual development. William Marshall enjoyed debating and regularly engaged his son in discussions about current events and constitutional law. According to various accounts, the elder Marshall would take Thurgood to observe court proceedings at the local courthouse, instilling in his son an early interest in the law and the American legal system. Marshall later credited his father with teaching him to argue and to think critically, traits that would serve him throughout his legal career.

Growing up in Baltimore during the era of Jim Crow laws, Marshall experienced racial segregation firsthand. The city's public facilities, schools, and neighborhoods were divided along racial lines, and African Americans faced systematic discrimination in nearly every aspect of daily life. These early experiences with racial injustice left a lasting impression on Marshall and shaped his determination to challenge segregation through legal means.

Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (later renamed Frederick Douglass High School), where he was known as an energetic and sometimes mischievous student. According to accounts of his school years, a teacher once disciplined Marshall by requiring him to read and memorize passages of the United States Constitution — an assignment that, by his own later recollection, helped spark his lifelong engagement with constitutional law.

Education

After graduating from high school, Marshall enrolled at Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania, one of the nation's oldest historically black colleges and universities. At Lincoln, he was a member of the debate team and the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He graduated with honors in 1930 with a bachelor's degree.

Marshall applied to the University of Maryland School of Law but was denied admission because of his race — an experience that fueled his resolve to fight segregation through the courts. He instead enrolled at the Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., where he came under the mentorship of Charles Hamilton Houston, the school's vice-dean and a pioneering legal scholar. Houston taught his students to be "social engineers" who would use the law as a tool for social change and civil rights advancement. Under Houston's tutelage, Marshall excelled academically, graduating first in his class in 1933 with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree. The legal education Marshall received at Howard, and particularly the strategic vision imparted by Houston, became the foundation for Marshall's subsequent career as a civil rights litigator.

Career

Early Legal Practice and the NAACP

After graduating from Howard in 1933, Marshall opened a private law practice in Baltimore. His early cases often involved civil rights matters, and he quickly became involved with the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). One of his first significant victories came in 1935, when he successfully represented Donald Gaines Murray in Murray v. Pearson, a case that challenged the University of Maryland School of Law's policy of denying admission to African-American applicants — the same institution that had rejected Marshall himself. The Maryland Court of Appeals upheld a lower court order requiring the law school to admit Murray, marking an early legal victory against segregation in higher education.

In 1936, Marshall joined Charles Hamilton Houston at the NAACP's national office in New York City, where Houston served as the organization's first special counsel. The two worked closely together on a series of legal challenges to segregation, including the case of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), in which the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri's practice of providing scholarships for African-American students to attend out-of-state law schools rather than admitting them to the state's own law school violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

When Houston returned to private practice in Washington, D.C., in 1938, Marshall succeeded him as the NAACP's chief legal officer. In 1940, he became the first director-counsel of the newly established NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), a position he held until 1961. Under Marshall's leadership, the LDF became the foremost legal organization dedicated to challenging racial discrimination and segregation in the United States.

Civil Rights Litigation

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Marshall argued numerous landmark cases before the Supreme Court that systematically dismantled the legal infrastructure of racial segregation and discrimination. His approach was methodical and strategic, building upon each legal victory to lay the groundwork for broader challenges to the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Among the significant cases Marshall argued during this period were:

• Smith v. Allwright (1944): The Supreme Court struck down the white primary system in Texas, ruling that excluding African Americans from primary elections violated the Fifteenth Amendment. This decision was a major victory in the fight for voting rights.

• Morgan v. Virginia (1946): The Court ruled that Virginia's law mandating segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional as a burden on interstate commerce.

• Shelley v. Kraemer (1948): The Court held that judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants that barred the sale of real property to African Americans constituted state action in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

• Sweatt v. Painter (1950): The Court ruled that the University of Texas School of Law's refusal to admit an African-American applicant, Heman Marion Sweatt, was unconstitutional, finding that the separate law school established for African Americans was not equal in quality to the University of Texas School of Law.

• McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950): The Court held that the University of Oklahoma's practice of segregating an admitted African-American graduate student within the university violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Marshall's approach to desegregation litigation was innovative in its reliance on sociological and psychological evidence to demonstrate the inherent inequality of segregation. Rather than simply arguing that separate facilities were unequal in their physical attributes, he presented data showing that the system of segregation itself inflicted psychological harm on African-American children and was therefore inherently unequal.

Brown v. Board of Education

The culmination of Marshall's desegregation strategy came with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a consolidated case that challenged racial segregation in public schools across several states. Marshall served as the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, arguing before the Supreme Court that segregation in public education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In his arguments, Marshall drew upon the sociological research of psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose "doll tests" demonstrated that segregation produced feelings of inferiority in African-American children. This evidence was central to the Court's reasoning in its unanimous decision, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren on May 17, 1954, which declared that "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" and that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

The Brown decision is considered one of the most consequential rulings in American legal history and a turning point in the civil rights movement. Marshall subsequently argued Cooper v. Aaron (1958), in which the Court unanimously rejected Arkansas's attempt to delay desegregation of public schools in Little Rock, reaffirming the principles established in Brown.

In total, Marshall argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court during his career as a civil rights attorney and won 29 of them — a record of advocacy that stands among the most successful in the Court's history.

United States Court of Appeals

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His nomination faced opposition from Southern senators, and his confirmation was delayed for nearly a year before the United States Senate approved his appointment. Marshall took his seat on October 5, 1961.

During his four years on the Second Circuit, Marshall authored over 100 opinions and favored a broad interpretation of constitutional protections for individual rights. None of his majority opinions were reversed by the Supreme Court during his tenure on the appellate bench.

Solicitor General

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as the 32nd Solicitor General of the United States, making him the first African American to hold that position. As Solicitor General, Marshall represented the federal government before the Supreme Court and won 14 of the 19 cases he argued in that capacity. His tenure as Solicitor General lasted from August 23, 1965, to August 30, 1967.

Supreme Court

On June 13, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice Tom C. Clark. Johnson reportedly told Marshall, "I want people to walk down the hall of the Supreme Court, and look at the door to see you sitting there — whether they are black or white." Marshall's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were contentious, with several Southern senators — including Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John L. McClellan of Arkansas — opposing the nomination. Despite this opposition, the full Senate confirmed Marshall on August 30, 1967, by a vote of 69 to 11. He was sworn in on October 2, 1967, becoming the first African American to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Marshall served on the Supreme Court for 24 years, from 1967 to 1991. During the early years of his tenure, the Court was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Marshall was frequently in the majority as the Court continued to expand protections for civil rights and civil liberties. After Warren's retirement in 1969, however, President Richard Nixon appointed more conservative justices — including Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and later Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell Jr., and William Rehnquist — and the Court's ideological center shifted to the right. Marshall increasingly found himself in dissent.

Marshall's closest ideological ally on the Court was Justice William J. Brennan Jr., and the two voted together in the vast majority of cases throughout their overlapping tenures. The Marshall-Brennan partnership became one of the most notable judicial alliances in the Court's history.

Jurisprudence

Marshall's judicial philosophy was shaped by his decades of experience as a civil rights lawyer and was characterized by a pragmatic, experience-based approach to constitutional interpretation. He often drew upon his real-world experiences representing African Americans facing discrimination to inform his understanding of how legal doctrines affected ordinary people.

One of Marshall's most significant contributions to constitutional doctrine was his "sliding-scale" approach to equal protection analysis. Under the prevailing framework, courts applied one of two levels of scrutiny — strict scrutiny or rational basis review — when evaluating claims under the Equal Protection Clause. Marshall argued that this rigid two-tier system was inadequate and proposed instead a more flexible balancing test that would consider the importance of the interest at stake and the invidiousness of the classification used. Although the Court never formally adopted Marshall's sliding-scale approach as its governing framework, his ideas influenced the development of intermediate scrutiny and continue to be discussed by legal scholars.

Marshall was also a steadfast defender of First Amendment rights. His jurisprudence in this area encompassed robust protections for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Marshall was a fervent opponent of capital punishment in the United States, and he consistently voted to strike down death sentences throughout his tenure on the Court. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), Marshall wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the death penalty was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment. After the Court upheld revised death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Marshall continued to dissent from every decision upholding a death sentence, maintaining that capital punishment was unconstitutional in all circumstances.

Marshall also wrote or joined important opinions on issues including affirmative action, abortion, prisoners' rights, and the rights of the indigent. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Marshall wrote a separate opinion defending affirmative action programs and arguing that the history of racial discrimination in the United States justified race-conscious remedial measures.

Retirement

On June 27, 1991, Marshall announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, citing advancing age and declining health. He was 82 years old. When asked at a press conference what was wrong with him, he reportedly replied: "I'm old. I'm getting old and coming apart." President George H. W. Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas to succeed Marshall, a controversial choice given that Thomas's judicial philosophy differed sharply from Marshall's on many issues.

Personal Life

Thurgood Marshall was married twice. His first wife was Vivian "Buster" Burey, whom he married in 1929 while attending Lincoln University. Vivian Marshall died of lung cancer in February 1955. In December 1955, Marshall married Cecilia Suyat, a secretary at the NAACP. The couple had two sons, Thurgood Marshall Jr. and John W. Marshall.

Throughout his career as a civil rights lawyer, Marshall faced considerable personal danger. He traveled extensively throughout the American South to investigate cases of racial violence and to represent African Americans in court, often at great risk to his own safety. He was threatened on multiple occasions, and his work brought him into direct confrontation with entrenched systems of racial oppression.

Marshall's FBI file, which has been partially released to the public, documented the Bureau's monitoring of his civil rights activities over many years.

Thurgood Marshall died on January 24, 1993, in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 84. He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Recognition

Marshall received numerous awards and honors during and after his lifetime. In 1946, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP's highest honor, for his legal work on behalf of civil rights.

In 1993, shortly before his death, Marshall was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), established in 1987, supports students at the nation's public historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly Black institutions. The organization has grown into one of the largest sources of scholarships and support for HBCU students. In 2025, the TMCF disclosed a total investment of $120 million from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott since 2020, and it awarded $16 million in grants to eight HBCUs to advance capacity building and innovation.

Numerous schools, buildings, and public institutions across the United States have been named in Marshall's honor, including the Thurgood Marshall Baltimore-Washington International Airport (formerly Baltimore-Washington International Airport, renamed in 2005) and the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, D.C.

Marshall's own words and writings have continued to be studied and quoted. A 2025 analysis by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) described Marshall as "a giant in American law and culture" and examined his record as a defender of First Amendment rights on the Supreme Court, noting that his civil rights legacy and Supreme Court advocacy extend beyond the equal protection cases for which he is most commonly known.

Legacy

Thurgood Marshall's career spanned some of the most consequential decades in the history of American civil rights law. As a litigator, he developed and executed a legal strategy that successfully dismantled the constitutional basis for racial segregation, fundamentally altering the legal landscape of the United States. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, which Marshall argued and won, is among the most cited and studied cases in American legal history and served as a catalyst for the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall brought to the bench a perspective grounded in the lived experience of racial discrimination, which informed his approach to constitutional interpretation. His "sliding-scale" approach to equal protection analysis, while never formally adopted as the Court's governing standard, influenced the development of intermediate scrutiny and continues to be discussed in legal scholarship. His unwavering opposition to the death penalty and his defense of individual liberties left a lasting mark on American jurisprudence.

Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1967 was itself a historic event, representing a milestone in the long struggle for racial equality in the United States. His presence on the Court for nearly a quarter-century ensured that the perspectives of African Americans and other marginalized groups were represented in the nation's highest judicial body during a period of significant legal and social change.

A 2025 retrospective by the Biography publication examined Marshall's own words and found that they revealed "the doubts, warnings, and moral urgency behind his historic legacy," reflecting a figure who remained clear-eyed about both the progress made and the distance still to be traveled in the pursuit of racial equality.

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund continues to carry forward Marshall's commitment to education by supporting students at public historically Black colleges and universities across the country, providing scholarships, programmatic support, and capacity-building grants to institutions that serve large numbers of African-American students.

Marshall is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, alongside other figures who shaped the history of the United States.