thurgood marshall

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 Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall coordinated the assault on racial segregation in schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in '' Brown v. Board of Education'', which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall attended Lincoln University and the Howard University School of Law. 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 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.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where he favored a broad interpretation of constitutional protections. Four years later, Johnson appointed him as the U.S. Solicitor General. In 1967, Johnson nominated Marshall to replace Justice Tom C. Clark on the Supreme Court; despite opposition from Southern senators, he was confirmed by a vote of 69 to 11. He was often in the majority during the consistently liberal Warren Court period, but after appointments by President Richard Nixon made the Court more conservative, Marshall frequently found himself in dissent. His closest ally on the Court was Justice William J. Brennan Jr., and the two voted the same way in most cases.

Marshall's jurisprudence was pragmatic and drew on his real-world experience. His most influential contribution to constitutional doctrine, the "sliding-scale" approach to the Equal Protection Clause, 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 Brennan 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. Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas. He died in 1993.

Early life and education

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 a schoolteacher. The family moved to New York City in search of better employment opportunities not long after Thurgood's birth; they returned to Baltimore when he was six years old. He was an energetic and boisterous child who frequently found himself in trouble. Following legal cases was one of William's hobbies, and Thurgood oftentimes went to court with him to observe the proceedings. Marshall later said that 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."

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, the oldest college for African Americans in the United States. The mischievous Marshall was suspended for two weeks in the wake of a hazing incident, but he earned good grades in his classes and led the school's debating team to numerous victories. His classmates included the poet Langston Hughes. Upon his graduation with honors in 1930 with a bachelor's degree in American literature and philosophy, Marshall—being unable to attend the all-white University of Maryland Law School—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 first in his class in June 1933 and passed the Maryland bar examination later that year.

Legal career

Marshall started a law practice in Baltimore, but it was not financially successful, partially because he spent much of his time working for the benefit of the community. He volunteered with the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP). In 1935, Marshall and Houston brought suit against the University of Maryland on behalf of Donald Gaines Murray, an African American whose application to the university's law school had been rejected on account of his race. In that case—'' Murray v. Pearson''—Judge Eugene O'Dunne ordered that Murray be admitted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that it violated equal protection to admit white students to the law school while keeping blacks from being educated in-state. The decision was never appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States and therefore did not apply nationwide, but it pleased Marshall, who later said that he had filed the lawsuit "to get even with the bastards" who had kept him from attending the school himself.

In 1936, Marshall joined Houston, who had been appointed as the NAACP's special counsel, in New York City, serving as his assistant. They worked together on the landmark case of ''Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada'' (1938)''.'' When Lloyd Lionel Gaines's application to the University of Missouri's law school was rejected on account of his race, he filed suit, arguing that his equal-protection rights had been violated because he had not been provided with a legal education substantially equivalent to that which white students received. After Missouri courts rejected Gaines's claims, Houston—joined by Marshall, who helped to prepare the brief—sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court. They did not challenge the Court's decision in '' Plessy v. Ferguson'' (1896), which had accepted the " separate but equal" doctrine; instead, they argued that Gaines had been denied an equal education. In an opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the justices agreed, holding that if Missouri gave whites the opportunity to attend law school in-state, it was required to do the same for blacks.

Houston returned to Washington in 1938, and Marshall assumed his position as special counsel the following year. He also became the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. (the Inc Fund), which had been established as a separate organization for tax purposes. In addition to litigating cases and arguing matters before the Supreme Court, he was responsible for raising money, managing the Inc Fund, and conducting public-relations work. Marshall litigated a number of cases involving unequal salaries for African Americans, winning nearly all of them; by 1945, he had ended salary disparities in major Southern cities and earned a reputation as a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. He also defended individuals who had been charged with crimes before both trial courts and the Supreme Court. Of the thirty-two civil rights cases that Marshall argued before the Supreme Court, he won twenty-nine. He and W. J. Durham wrote the brief in '' Smith v. Allwright'' (1944), in which the Court ruled the white primary unconstitutional, and he successfully argued both '' Morgan v. Virginia'' (1946), involving segregation on interstate buses, and a companion case to '' Shelley v. Kraemer'' (1948), involving racially restrictive covenants.

In the years after 1945, Marshall resumed his offensive against racial segregation in schools. Together with his Inc Fund colleagues, he devised a strategy that emphasized the inherent educational disparities caused by segregation rather than the physical differences between the schools provided for blacks and whites. The Court ruled in Marshall's favor in '' Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma'' (1948), ordering that Oklahoma provide Ada Lois Sipuel with a legal education, although the justices declined to order that she be admitted to the state's law school for whites. In 1950, Marshall brought two cases involving education to the Court: '' McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents'', which was George W. McLaurin's challenge to unequal treatment at the University of Oklahoma's graduate school, and ''Sweatt v. Painter'', which was Heman Sweatt's challenge to his being required to attend a blacks-only law school in Texas. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of both McLaurin and Sweatt on the same day; although the justices did not overrule ''Plessy'' and the separate but equal doctrine, they rejected discrimination against African-American students and the provisions of schools for blacks that were inferior to those provided for whites.

Marshall next turned to the issue of segregation in primary and secondary schools. The NAACP brought suit to challenge segregated schools in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia, arguing both that there were disparities between the physical facilities provided for blacks and whites and that segregation was inherently harmful to African-American children. Marshall helped to try the South Carolina case. He called numerous social scientists and other expert witnesses to testify regarding the harms of segregation; these included the psychology professor Ken Clark, who testified that segregation in schools caused self-hatred among African-American students and inflicted damage that was "likely to endure as long as the conditions of segregation exist". The five cases eventually reached the Supreme Court and were argued in December 1952. In contrast to the oratorical rhetoric of his adversary— John W. Davis, a former solicitor general and presidential candidate—Marshall spoke plainly and conversationally. He stated that the only possible justification for segregation "is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as possible. And now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for." On May 17, 1954, after internal disagreements and a 1953 reargument, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in '' Brown v. Board of Education'', holding in an opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren that: "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." When Marshall heard Warren read those words, he later said, "I was so happy I was numb".

The Court in ''Brown'' ordered additional arguments on the proper remedy for the constitutional violation that it had identified; in ''Brown'' II, decided in 1955, the justices ordered that desegregation proceed "with all deliberate speed". Their refusal to set a concrete deadline came as a disappointment to Marshall, who had argued for total integration to be completed by September 1956. In the years following the Court's decision, Marshall coordinated challenges to Virginia's " massive resistance" to ''Brown'', and he returned to the Court to successfully argue '' Cooper v. Aaron'' (1958), involving Little Rock's attempt to delay integration. Marshall, who according to the legal scholar Mark Tushnet "gradually became a civil rights leader more than a civil rights lawyer", spent substantial amounts of time giving speeches and fundraising; in 1960, he accepted an invitation from Tom Mboya to help draft Kenya's constitution. By that year, Tushnet writes, he had become "the country's most prominent Supreme Court advocate".

Court of Appeals

President John F. Kennedy, who according to Tushnet "wanted to demonstrate his commitment to the interests of African Americans without incurring enormous political costs", nominated Marshall to be a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on September 23, 1961. The Second Circuit, which spanned New York, Vermont, and Connecticut, was at the time the nation's prominent appellate court. When Congress adjourned, Kennedy gave Marshall a recess appointment, and he took the oath of office on October 23.

Even after his recess appointment, Southern senators continued to delay Marshall's full confirmation for more than eight months. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed his hearing several times, leading Senator Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, to charge that the three-member subcommittee, which included two pro-segregation Southern Democrats, was biased against Marshall and engaged in unjustifiable delay. The subcommittee held several hearings between May and August 1962; Marshall faced harsh questioning from the Southerners over what the scholar Howard Ball described as "marginal issues at best". After further delays from the subcommittee, the full Judiciary Committee bypassed it and, by an 11–4 vote on September 7, endorsed Marshall's nomination. Following five hours of floor debate, the full Senate confirmed him by a 56–14 vote on September 11, 1962.

On the Second Circuit, Marshall authored 98 majority opinions, none of which was reversed by the Supreme Court, as well as 8 concurrences and 12 dissents. He dissented when a majority held in the Fourth Amendment case of ''United States ex rel. Angelet v. Fay'' (1964) that the Supreme Court's 1961 decision in '' Mapp v. Ohio'' (which held that the exclusionary rule applied to the states) did not apply retroactively, writing that the judiciary was "not free to circumscribe the application of a declared constitutional right". In ''United States v. Wilkins'' (1964), he concluded that the Fifth Amendment's protection against double jeopardy applied to the states; in ''People of the State of New York v. Galamison'' (1965), he dissented from a ruling upholding the convictions of civil rights protesters at the New York World's Fair. Marshall's dissents indicated that he favored broader interpretations of constitutional protections than did his colleagues.

Solicitor General

When Archibald Cox resigned, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to take his place as Solicitor General—the individual responsible for arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government. The nomination was widely viewed as a stepping stone to a Supreme Court appointment. Johnson pressured Southern senators not to obstruct Marshall's confirmation, and a hearing before a Senate subcommittee lasted only fifteen minutes; the full Senate confirmed him on August 11, 1965. As Solicitor General, Marshall won fourteen of the nineteen Supreme Court cases he argued. He later characterized the position as "the most effective job" and "maybe the best" job he ever had. Marshall argued in '' Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections'' (1966) that conditioning the ability to vote on the payment of a poll tax was unlawful; in a companion case to '' Miranda v. Arizona'' (1966), he unsuccessfully maintained on behalf of the government that federal agents were not always required to inform arrested individuals of their rights. He defended the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in '' South Carolina v. Katzenbach'' (1966) and '' Katzenbach v. Morgan'' (1966), winning both cases.

Supreme Court nomination

In February 1967, Johnson nominated Ramsey Clark to be Attorney General. The nominee's father was Tom C. Clark, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Fearing that his son's appointment would create substantial conflicts of interest for him, the elder Clark announced his resignation from the Court. For Johnson, who had long desired to nominate a non-white justice, the choice of a nominee to fill the ensuing vacancy "was as easy as it was obvious", according to the scholar Henry J. Abraham. Although the President briefly considered selecting William H. Hastie (an African-American appellate judge from Philadelphia) or a female candidate, he decided to choose Marshall. Johnson announced the nomination in the White House Rose Garden on June 13, declaring that Marshall "deserves the appointment... I believe that it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place."

The public received the nomination favorably, and Marshall was praised by prominent senators from both parties. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings for five days in July. Marshall faced harsh criticism from such senators as Mississippi's James O. Eastland, North Carolina's Sam Ervin Jr., Arkansas's John McClellan, and South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, all of whom opposed the nominee's liberal jurisprudence. In what ''Time'' magazine characterized as a "Yahoo-type hazing", Thurmond asked Marshall over sixty questions about various minor aspects of the history of certain constitutional provisions. By an 11–5 vote on August 3, the committee recommended that Marshall be confirmed. On August 30, after six hours of debate, senators voted 69–11 to confirm Marshall to the Supreme Court. He took the constitutional oath of office on October 2, 1967, becoming the first African American to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Supreme Court

Marshall remained on the Supreme Court for nearly twenty-four years, serving until his retirement in 1991. The Court to which he was appointed—the Warren Court—had a consistent liberal majority, and Marshall's jurisprudence was similar to that of its leaders, Chief Justice Warren and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Although he wrote few major opinions during this period due to his lack of seniority, he was typically in the majority. As a result of four Supreme Court appointments by President Richard Nixon, however, the liberal coalition vanished. The Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger (the Burger Court) was not as conservative as some observers had anticipated, but the task of constructing liberal majorities case-by-case was left primarily to Brennan; Marshall's most consequential contributions to constitutional law came in dissent. The justice left much of his work to his law clerks, preferring to determine the outcome of the case and then allow the clerks to draft the opinion themselves. He took umbrage at frequent claims that he did no work and spent his time watching daytime soap operas; according to Tushnet, who clerked for Marshall, the idea that he "was a lazy Justice uninterested in the Court's work... is wrong and perhaps racist". Marshall's closest colleague and friend on the Court was Brennan, and the two justices agreed so often that their clerks privately referred to them as "Justice Brennanmarshall". He also had a high regard for Warren, whom he described as "probably the greatest Chief Justice who ever lived".

Marshall consistently sided with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc. According to the scholar William J. Daniels: "His approach to justice was Warren Court–style legal realism... In his dissenting opinions he emphasized individual rights, fundamental fairness, equal opportun