Who Was Thurgood Marshall? A Brief Biography

Thurgood Marshall was a successful civil rights lawyer and the first Black Supreme Court justice. Born Thoroughgood Marshall on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, his legacy includes several landmark civil rights court cases, notably Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which helped undo the “separate but equal” doctrine. This case and many others established Marshall as a major figure in the fight for racial justice in the twentieth century. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, and he served on the court for twenty-four years.

From his education to his impact as a lawyer, here’s a brief breakdown of Marshall’s life:

• Early years: Marshall’s father, William Marshall, was a railroad porter and his mother, Norma, was a school teacher. After graduating high school, Marshall enrolled at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, where he was a student alongside poet Langston Hughes.
• Legal studies: Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in 1930 and continued his studies at Howard University Law School. Under the mentorship of Charles Hamilton Houston—a prominent Black lawyer and future special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—he graduated first in his class from Howard in 1933.
• Legal career and NAACP: Marshall opened his private practice in Baltimore following graduation. He earned his first major court victory in 1935 with Murray v. Pearson. He successfully argued that the University of Maryland Law School violated the Fourteenth Amendment by denying applicants because of their race. The win got him the attention of the NAACP, where he served as a staff lawyer and later as chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Marshall established his reputation as one of the nation’s most successful civil rights lawyers with a series of groundbreaking legal cases in the 1940s and 1950s during the Jim Crow era. He argued thirty-two cases before the US Supreme Court and won twenty-nine of those cases, including these three landmark cases:

1. 1. Brown v. Board of Education: This 1954 lawsuit filed by Black families in Topeka, Kansas, against the city’s Board of Education was one of Marshall’s most historic court cases. Rather than rely on the “separate but equal” reasoning of prior rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education insisted that due process and equal protection of the laws were innately inconsistent with segregation. This case brought an end to racial segregation in public schools nationwide and was a significant stepping stone for the civil rights movement.
2. 2. Smith v. Allwright: This 1944 case involved a Black dentist Lonnie E. Smith, who alleged he could not vote in a Texas primary because of his race. Marshall argued before the Supreme Court that the state violated Smith’s constitutional rights, and the Supreme Court sided with him with a vote of eight to one.
3. 3. Sweatt v. Painter: This 1950 case, which Black law student Heman Marion Sweatt filed against the University of Texas School of Law, was a forerunner to Brown v. Board of Education. The case alleged the school barred Sweatt from attending on the basis of his race. The Supreme Court voted in his favor in a unanimous decision.

After a successful career as a lawyer, Marshall went on to serve on the Supreme Court for more than two decades.

• Court of Appeals and Solicitor General positions: President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961, and in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson named him United States Solicitor General.
• Nomination to the Supreme Court: In 1967, President Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court. His appointment as Associate Justice in 1967 made him the first Black American Supreme Court Justice in US history.
• Tenure on the Supreme Court: Justice Thurgood Marshall served on the US Supreme Court for twenty-four years and participated in numerous historic court decisions on civil rights, affirmative action, and the death penalty. Among the most notable cases during his tenure with the Supreme Court was Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US Constitution protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. Marshall joined a majority, including Justice Willam Brennan and Chief Justice Warren Burger, to uphold that decision. He voted that the death penalty was unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia and continued to argue it violated individual rights during his time on the court.
• Retirement. Marshall cited his declining health as the motivation for his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1991. President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as his replacement. Tributes to Marshall’s activism and celebrated legal career poured in after his death on January 24, 1993, including at colleges, federal office buildings in Washington, DC, and an airport in Baltimore named in his honor. His life was also the subject of George Stevens Jr.’s play, Thurgood, which Laurence Fishburne performed in 2008 on Broadway in New York.

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