1908 July 2

Thurgood Marshall, Civil Rights Giant, is Born

 

Thurgood Marshall, one of the greatest figures in U. S. history and a giant in the civil rights movement, was born on this day.

Marshall was an African-American attorney who headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1938 until 1961. He planned the strategy and the court cases that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education case, which declared the principle of “separate but equal” unconstitutional. He also argued the case before the Supreme Court. The decision came on May 17, 1954.

Marshall was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson as the first African-American on the Supreme Court, and he  joined the Court on October 2, 1967.  He served on the Court until retiring in 1991, and he died in January 1993.

Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court took some skillful political maneuvering by President Lyndon Johnson, however. LBJ was deeply committed to appointing Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. There was just one problem: there was no vacancy on the court in 1967. So LBJ engineered a classic bit of LBJ maneuvering to create a vacancy. First, he talked Nicholas Katzenbach to resign as Attorney General and accept a position as Undersecretary State. Then he let it be known that he wanted to appoint Ramsey Clark, the son of Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, as Attorney General. He know full well that many people would see serious conflicts with Justice Tom Clark ruling on his son’s cases. So he talked with Justice Clark about the problem, playing to the judge’s family pride in having his son as attorney general. The elder Clark wanted his son as AG and so agreed to retire from the court. This created the vacancy that Thurgood Marshall could and did fill. (Read the whole story in Wil Haygood, Showdown, below.)

The Baltimore/Washington International Airport is named the Thurgood Marshall Airport in his honor. It is only one of many memorials to him. A statue of him stands at State House Square in Annapolis, Maryland.

It is important to note that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s, modeled her litigation program after Marshall’s program that lead to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. Marshall’s strategy involved not immediately challenging segregated public schools because he believed that neither the Supreme Court nor the public was ready for dramatic change. Instead, he embarked on a strategy of challenging smaller issues such as segregation in state law schools, for the purpose of building a body of case law that would support the eventual challenge to segregated public schools. As we know, the strategy worked. And it worked for Ginsburg in the area of women’s rights.

Don’t miss: Wil Haygood, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (2015)

Read: Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936 – 1961 (2004).

And read: Carl Rowan, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1994)

Learn more about Thurgood Marshall:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMNGNXGo82g

And more about this life and accomplishments: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/thurgood-marshall

Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here

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