At Howard, he met his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston, who encouraged Marshall and his classmates to use the law for social change. After graduating from Howard, one of Marshall's first legal cases was against the University of Maryland Law School in the case Murray v.
Working with his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall sued the school for denying admission to Black applicants solely on the basis of race. The legal duo successfully argued that the law school violated the 14th Amendment guarantee of protection of the law, an amendment that addresses citizenship and the rights of citizens.
Marshall became one of the nation's leading attorneys. He argued 32 cases before the U. Supreme Court, winning Some of his notable cases include:. Marshall's most famous case was the landmark Brown v. Marshall retired from the bench in and passed away on January 24, , in Washington D. Civil rights and social change came about through meticulous and persistent litigation efforts, at the forefront of which stood Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund.
Through the courts, he ensured that Black people enjoyed the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship. Help us continue his legacy, donate what you can today! Marshall was born on July 2, , in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Marshall, railroad porter, who later worked on the staff of Gibson Island Club, a white-only country club and Norma Williams, a school teacher.
One of his great-grandfathers had been taken as a slave from the Congo to Maryland where he was eventually freed. Ferguson which established the legal doctrine called, "separate but equal. Applauding Marshall's victory, author H.
Mencken wrote that the decision of denial by the University of Maryland Law School was "brutal and absurd," and they should not object to the "presence among them of a self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college. During this period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of Ghana and what is now Tanzania.
It was felt that the person who so successfully fought for the rights of America's oppressed minority would be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the White citizens in these two former European colonies.
After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in , President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues.
Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, "none of his Marshall's 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in , Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government.
Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall established a record for supporting the voiceless American. Having honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall leaves a legacy that expands that early sensitivity to include all of America's voiceless.
Justice Marshall died on January 24, Thoroughgood Marshall was born July 2, , in Baltimore, Maryland; his father was a railroad porter and his mother a schoolteacher. After a brief period in New York City, the family moved to a racially diverse, largely middle class neighborhood in Baltimore called Druid Hill, although he attended segregated schools, graduating from the city's Colored High School in when he was only 16 years old.
He shortened his name to Thurgood in the second grade. Marshall's exposure to the law and the Constitution was unusually early. His father, William Marshall, never attended college, but he was fascinated by court trials and often took his son along with him. Marshall described himself as a "hell raiser" as a child, and while his naturally argumentative nature may have gotten him into a certain amount of trouble, it would prove a useful trait as a lawyer. One of Marshall's punishments for talking too much involved the U.
I made my way through every paragraph. These early experiences reinforced many of the deepest convictions that shaped Marshall's professional career, including the importance of education for individual advancement, a deep respect for the legal profession, and the recognition of the bonds of family and community.
Thurgood Marshall while he was a student at Lincoln University. The photo is Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity pledges Marshall is 2nd from right in middle row.
Thurgood Marshall graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree from Lincoln University in The school was chartered in as the Ashmun Institute and described by one of its early presidents as "the first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.
At Lincoln, Marshall's interest in civil rights and the law deepened and he became a star member of the school's debating team, which competed against teams from such powerhouse institutions as Harvard University and Britain's Cambridge University. Marshall also met and married Vivian Burey in , then a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Marshall wanted to attend the University of Maryland Law School but did not apply after it became clear that he would not be admitted into the segregated institution. He made the long daily commute from Baltimore to Howard because he couldn't afford housing. His mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to help pay the tuition. Marshall nevertheless excelled at Howard, graduating first in his class in At Howard, Marshall made the most important professional friendship and alliance of his career with Professor Charles Hamilton Houston, who served as an important intellectual father to the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States.
Houston was the first African American lawyer to win a case before the U. Supreme Court. Marshall credited Houston, who died in , with devising the basic legal strategy that ultimately succeeded in legal segregation in the United States, specifically the "separate but equal" provisions of the Supreme Court's Plessy v.
Ferguson decision. Referring to Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall said, "The school case was really Charlie's victory. He just never got a chance to see it. A Career and a Cause After earning his law degree, Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore in the depths of the Great Depression but quickly found himself in debt by handling civil rights cases for poor clients. A year later, with Houston as his adviser, Marshall won his first major racial discrimination case, Murray v. Pearson, which ended segregation of the University of Maryland's Law School.
The victory over the school that had previously denied him admittance was especially sweet for Marshall, but the decision didn't strike at the heart of segregation since it was won on the grounds that the state of Maryland could not provide a credible "separate but equal" institution for providing African Americans with a legal education. In Marshall became a staff NAACP lawyer based in New York; two years later, he succeeded Houston as the organization's chief counsel, although the two continued to work closely together.
The Fund became a separate organization in His commitment to racial justice led him and his staff to develop ways of thinking about constitutional litigation that have been enormously influential far beyond the areas of segregation and discrimination.
I don't know. The nearest I can get is that my dad, my brother and I had the most violent arguments you ever heard about anything. I guess we argued five out of seven nights at the dinner table. Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School later renamed Frederick Douglass High School , where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team.
The teenage Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution , was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class.
After graduating from high school in , Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania. There, he joined a remarkably distinguished student body that included Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, poet Langston Hughes and jazz singer Cab Calloway. Despite being overqualified academically, Marshall was rejected because of his race.
This firsthand experience with discrimination in education made a lasting impression on Marshall and helped determine the future course of his career. Instead of Maryland, Marshall attended law school in Washington, D. Marshall quickly fell under the tutelage of Houston, a notorious disciplinarian and extraordinarily demanding professor. Marshall recalled of Houston, "He would not be satisfied until he went to a dance on the campus and found all of his students sitting around the wall reading law books instead of partying.
Marshall graduated magna cum laude from Howard in He briefly attempted to establish his own practice in Baltimore, but without experience, he failed to land any significant cases. Over several decades, Marshall argued and won a variety of cases to strike down many forms of legalized racism, helping to inspire the American civil rights movement.
In one of Marshall's first cases — which he argued alongside his mentor, Charles Houston — he defended another well-qualified undergraduate, Donald Murray, who like himself had been denied entrance to the University of Maryland Law School. Marshall and Houston won Murray v. Pearson in January , the first in a long string of cases designed to undermine the legal basis for de jure racial segregation in the United States.
Marshall's first victory before the Supreme Court came in Chambers v. Florida , in which he successfully defended four Black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police. Another crucial Supreme Court victory for Marshall came in the case of Smith v.
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