Civil Rights Library

Thurgood Marshall

b. July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Md., U.S.
d. Jan. 24, 1993, Bethesda, Md.

First black member of the U.S. Supreme Court. As an attorney he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Marshall graduated from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania (1930), and Howard University Law School, Washington, D.C. (1933, ranking first in his class). From 1936 he worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1940 he became chief of its legal staff. He won 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. Among them, in addition to Brown, were cases in which the court declared unconstitutional a Southern state's exclusion of black voters from primary elections (Smith v. Allwright, 1944), state judicial enforcement of racial "restrictive covenants" in housing (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), and "separate but equal" facilities for black professionals and graduate students in state universities (Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, both 1950).

In September 1961, Marshall was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President John F. Kennedy, but opposition from Southern senators delayed his confirmation for several months. President Lyndon B. Johnson named Marshall U.S. solicitor general in July 1965 and nominated him to the Supreme Court in June 1967. Marshall was a steadfast liberal during his tenure on the court, and he maintained his previous views concerning the need for equitable and just treatment of the nation's minorities by the state and federal governments. By the time he retired in 1991, he was one of the last remaining liberal members of a Supreme Court dominated by a conservative majority.