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Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 - January 24, 1993) was the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was known for his liberal and pro-Civil rights positions.
He served on the court from 1967 until 1991, when he retired due to ill health.
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His parents, William and Norma, named him after his great-grandfather, a former slave who had fought for the Union Army during the civil war. However, Marshall found the name cumbersome and was known as Thurgood from childhood. After graduating from Frederick Douglass High School and Lincoln University, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. He was turned down because of that school's segregation policy and attended Howard University instead.
Marshall received his law degree from Howard in 1933, and set up a private practice in Baltimore. The following year, he began working with the Baltimore NAACP. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, in 1936; his co-counsel on that case was Charles Houston. Marshall represented Donald Gaines Murray, a student who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of his race.
Marshall won his first Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida 309 US 227 1940. That same year, at the age of 32, he was appointed Chief counsel for the NAACP. He argued many other cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully, including Smith v. Allwright 321 US 649 1944, Shelley v. Kraemer 334 US 1 1948, Sweatt v. Painter 339 US 629 1950, and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents 339 US 637 1950. His most famous case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 1954, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public education was illegal because it could never be truly equal. In total, Marshall won twenty nine out of the thirty-two cases he argued before the Supreme Court.
President Kennedy appointed Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. A group of white southern Senators held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a "recess appointment." Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson appointed him Solicitor General. Johnson then appointed him to the Supreme Court on June 13, 1967, saying that this was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place."
President Johnson confidently predicted to one biographer, Doris Kearns, that a lot of black baby boys would be named "Thurgood" in honor of this choice.
Marshall served on the Court for the next twenty-four years, handing down opinions in several key cases. His most frequent ally on the Court was Justice William Brennan, who, among other issues, consistently joined him in opposing the death penalty. There is a memorial to him near the Maryland state house.
Marshall was married twice; to Vivien "Buster" Burey from 1929 until her death in February 1955 and to Cecilia "Cissy" Suyat from December 1955 until his death in 1993. Marshall had two sons from his second marriage; Thurgood Marshall Jr., a former top aide to President Bill Clinton, and John W. Marshall, who is currently Secretary of Public Safety in the Cabinet of Virginia Governor Mark Warner and a former United States Marshals Service Director.
| Preceded by: Tom Campbell Clark |
Associate Justice | Succeeded by: Clarence Thomas |