His mother, Norma, who worked as a teacher, pleaded each term with the universitys registrar to accept late payments, whenever she could scrape together enough money to pay the cost of attendance. The case revolved around a young Black student, Linda Brown, who had to travel across town to attend school when an all-white school was far closer. After two years of representing the United States before the Supreme Court, he received yet another honorin 1967, Thurgood Marshall joined the Supreme Court as the first Black Supreme Court Justice. He enrolled for pre-med because his mother wanted him to become a dentist but remained just as fun-loving: he joined a fraternity and led the debate club. Marshall again challenged the state, and in 1950, the Supreme Court would find that Texass crude attempts at equality were in vain, and that at least in the area of law education, separate could not be equal. He kept talking about Thoreau, and I told him If I understand it, Thoreau wrote his book in jail. Thurgood Marshall was traveling with fellow Black NAACP lawyer Zephaniah Alexander Looby, and a white lawyer and journalist, when their car was stopped by police, who falsely accused Marshall of drunk driving. Houston worked tirelessly to fight against Jim Crow laws that prevented Blacks from serving on juries and accessing housing. Deciding that it was better to keep the FBI as an ally against more dangerous enemies, Marshall and other NAACP leaders strategically fed agents information about suspected Communists that had infiltrated the group. Even after King was assassinated, Marshall praised him as a leader and speaker, but said that his tactics didn't achieve tangible goals. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. Young Thoroughgood would eventually change his name to Thurgood. Black families in the towns would risk their own lives to let him stay with them, and ThoughtCo. Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer who was appointed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1967. He remained in this position for four years. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP were also wary of the Bureau's prying eyes, but they were more concerned about white supremacist terrorist groups like the KKK. If you want to write a book, you go to jail and write it, (Marshall, 471). As African American parents in Hearne kept their children home from school, 100 miles away in Houston, black schoolteacher Henry Eman Doyle was the sole law student registered at Texas State University for Negroes, a hastily organized three-room school created by the State of Texas after Marshall won a discrimination case brought on behalf of Heman Sweatt, a black student who had been barred from registering at the University of Texas Law School. But he was also the subject of FBI investigation, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. He argued the law violated the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection clause, which guarantees equal protection under the law. The Supreme Court denied his appeal stating that facilities could be separate, so long as they were equal. He also met, , the vice-dean, who would become a significant figure in Marshalls life as a mentor and door-opener. As a result, he earned the title of the Great Dissenter., Justice Thurgood Marshalls Accomplishments. According to FBI files, critics tried to connect Marshall to communism through his membership in the National Lawyers Guild, a group that was called "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party by the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. He made them read the newspaper every day, and held debates with them around the dinner table, in which they were expected to defend every point they made. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. says Marshall switched from medicine to law. . Brown was the culmination of the NAACP's strategic use of multiple lawsuits to attack segregation in education and beyond. Finally, on August 30, the Senate voted to send him to the Supreme Court. Wells, N. Douglas. He often volunteered with the NAACP and in 1935, Charles Houston helped get Marshall appointed as Assistant Special Counsel for New York. However, he is still a hero among civil rights legislators, thanks to his determination to force the Constitution to live up to its promise to protect everyone equally even people the Founding Fathers didn't regard as human. During his tenure, he had a stellar record once again, with not one of his opinions reversed on appeal to the Supreme Court. In an echo of the life story of Frederick Douglass, some civil rights activists felt that Marshall was betraying Black women by marrying Suyat, a Filipino-American who grew up in Hawaii. The school superintendent announced that $300,000 would be devoted to the construction of a new school for black students, and a $70,000 bond issue was placed on the ballot. But Marshall never returned to his night job. Their postwar ambitions for their children ran headlong into the determination of Southern whites to reinforce segregation. He was not just a judge but a federal judge and Supreme Court Justice. "He is truly a living legend," says Harvard law professor Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. That December, Thurgood Marshall married his second wife, Cecilia Suyat, a secretary for the NAACP. He wrote the Courts seminal decision on free speech rights of public employees, Pickering v. Board of Education (1968). . Chief Justice Earl Warren was also an advocate for judicial activism and had been at the helm when the court deemed segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. Its not a grand civil-rights case that would go all the way to the Supreme Court, nor has the name of the man Marshall defended gone down in history. Rather than civil disobedience and demonstrations, Marshall favored legal remedies as more efficient and effective. His mother Norma was a Kindergarten teacher and his father William worked as a dining car waiter before becoming chief steward at a country club. Marshall tackled equal pay for African-American teachers after he graduated from Howard Universitys law school in 1933. Marshall said that he would have been lynched if not for the arrival of his colleagues. Marshall was the first African-American to serve on the Supreme Court, consistently championed First Amendment and other individual rights. Irvin and Sammy Shepherd were sentenced to death, while 16-year-old Charles Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. He viewed the amended Constitution, in the words of his biographer Juan Williams, as essentially a manifesto of individual liberty (p. 400). Spell maintained that while it was true that he had initiated a sexual interaction, it had been consensual, and that they had stopped when she said she was worried about being found out. When arguing before the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall used sociological data to prove that attending segregated schools was damaging for Black students regardless of the facilities, because it instilled in them a feeling of inferiority. Du Bois himself, a founder of the NAACP, resigned from the organization in a huff in 1934 over the need to pay more attention to Northern discrimination as a barrier to full racial equality. The standoff between African American parents in Hearne and the local white school superintendent drew the attention of attorney Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall is important because of the large role he played in advancing the civil rights movement. After graduating, he applied to the University of Maryland School of Law, but was turned down because he was Black. Everything you need to know on . The case revolved around a young Black student, Linda Brown, who had to travel across town to attend school when an all-white school was far closer. Despite common beliefs in American democracy and integrationist goals, King and Marshall disagreed over tactics. One of Thurgood Marshalls high school classmates was Langston Hughes who would go on to become a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Chief Justice Earl Warren was also an advocate for judicial activism and had been at the helm when the court deemed segregation unconstitutional in, . Williams, Juan. Marshall wrote, Vigilance is necessary to ensure that public employers do not use authority over employees to silence discourse, not because it hampers public functions but simply because superiors disagree with the content of employees speech., Marshalls powerful language in Police Department of Chicago v. Mosley (1972) ushered in the Courts content discrimination principle, which became the Courts chief methodological tool for deciding free expression cases. Unless you're a lawyer or a law super-nerd, you can probably only name a handful of Supreme Court decisions. Seventy-three years later, I became the LDFs seventh president and director-counsel. While working for the NAACP in 1946, Marshall traveled to Columbia, Tennessee to defend a group of African-American men. It seemed like this was a case that was actually harming peoples livelihoods and as a result was a case that was drawing a tremendous amount of attention in the local African-American communities.. Where did Thurgood Marshall attend law school? Marshalls commitment to the First Amendment extended to prison inmates. While his successes outshone his losses in media reports, Marshall himself never forgot the Groveland Four. by Sherrilyn Ifill 2021 Sherrilyn Ifill. Upon receiving the answer of seven, Marshall asked: Seven out of eighteen thousand, and the school board was afraid that seven students wearing armbands would disrupt eighteen thousand. He stood as a living, breathing shield for black people against the lynch mob as well as the judges death sentence.. . October 6, 2017 In "Marshall," a new movie starring Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad, the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argues a case for a black man accused of rape. I'm not marrying the country, and they're not marrying me.". In 1936, Marshall and his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston served as the attorneys for Donald Gaines Murray, a law student who filed suit after he, like Marshall, was rejected by the University of Maryland School of Law over his race. As Mark V. Tushnet explains in his book Making Civil Rights Law, headline-making criminal cases were one of the most effective branch recruitment tools at their disposal in the pre-war 1940s especially because of the organizations widely publicized stance on only taking such cases when they believed the defendant was innocent. After working in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) national office as an assistant to chief counsel Charles Houston, his former law school professor, Marshall succeeded him as NAACP chief counsel in 1938. Young Thoroughgood would eventually change his name to Thurgood. A few weeks later, in September 1947, African American parents initiated a mass boycott. Marshall became the LDFs first president and its director-counsel in 1940. Set individual study goals and earn points reaching them. Her action prodded Marshall and the LDF lawyers to file Davis v. Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the four Brown cases. As a civil rights lawyer he changed America. Brown is Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown, who History says filed suit in 1951 when his daughter was denied admission to a white elementary school near their house in Topeka, Kansas. I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his theory about disobeying the law. I didnt believe in that.Marshall recalled. We look to these heroes from our past for lessons and inspiration as we continue their important work into the future. I would call him the greatest lawyer of the twentieth century., 2023 Minute Media - All Rights Reserved. Despite his stellar academic record, the school denied his application because of his racethe University of Maryland was still segregated. In 1948, U.S. officials vigorously prosecuted German war criminals in Nuremberg for enforcing anti-Semitic policies, practices and laws that advanced a theory of ethnic and religious inferiority of Jews. Privacy Statement I still don't." He wrote the Courts opinion in Arkansas Writers Project, Inc. v. Ragland (1987), which invalidated a state law taxing general-interest magazines but not newspapers and professional trade journals. By signing up you are agreeing to our, Jane Fonda 'Ashamed' of Her Silence on Weinstein, 2023 TIME USA, LLC. It took a year for the Senate to confirm his nomination, over the objection of several southern Senators. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. Thurgood Marshall: A Biography discusses the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in a chronological fashion, and then discusses his legacy after death. Thurgood Marshall [electronic resource]. Cookie Settings, Corbis Historical / Library of Congress via Getty Images. " As Marshall grew up, he wasn't afraid to literally fight back against the racism he encountered in segregated Baltimore. A case in Texas offered a chance for the prosecutor and future Supreme Court justice to test the legality of segregation, To cover the 400 years of Black America, we divided Four Hundred Souls into ten sections, each covering 40 years. At one point, he was overseeing as many as 450 cases at the same time. Some people have taken this admiration one step further. The Institute cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings, statements, or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. The content discrimination principle determined whether a regulation discriminated against speech because of the content of its message. Marshall earned his BA from Lincoln University in 1930. Ifills essay captures the long struggle for educational equality in the United States. He was once arrested over a physical altercation with a white man who pulled Marshall off a trolley car because he got in ahead of a white woman. P: (650) 723-2092 | F: (650) 723-2093 | kinginstitute@stanford.edu| Campus Map. of the users don't pass the Thurgood Marshall quiz! He joined the majority of the Court in the landmark student-speech decision, Marshall also voted to protect the First Amendment rights of prisoners, Marshalls commitment to the First Amendment extended to, Marshall had a controversial First Amendment opinion about obscenity, One of Marshalls most controversial First Amendment opinions was, government could not criminalize the private possession of, Marshall also was a staunch advocate of freedom of the press. In the 1950s, Marshall tipped off the FBI about communist attempts to infiltrate the NAACP. Marshall later became chief counsel for the NAACP and argued numerous civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. As a result, he earned the title of the Great Dissenter.. StudySmarter is commited to creating, free, high quality explainations, opening education to all. Thurgood Marshall was a member of the Democratic Party. It denied African Americans equal protection of the law It violated the Thirteenth Amendment. As chief legal counsel of the NAACP, Marshall oversaw hundreds of cases. But the case that inspired the new movie Marshall, arriving in theaters on Friday and starring Chadwick Boseman, isnt one of those famous lawsuits. He worked three jobs and his mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to pay his out-of-state tuition. The legal career of Thurgood Marshall the man who became famous arguing cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and in 1967 became the first black Supreme Court justice is full of cases that changed the American legal landscape. Proving his innocence was also a matter of economic life and death, as reports spread of fearful white families dismissing their black employees. Thurgood Marshall was an American civil rights activist with the National Association for the Advancement of As the new precedent, Brown v. Board led to the end of segregation outside of the school system as well. Once Brown v. Board is decided, this huge NAACP victory, then the real battles begin.. WebResource Life Story: Pauli Murray (1910-1985) Bringing the Struggles of Identity to the Fight for Civil Rights The story of a woman who advocated for full equality, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality. In 1936, Thurgood Marshall took over as Special Counsel of New York, taking the position from Charles Houston. According to Baltimore Magazine, in 1938, Marshall became the NAACP's chief legal counsel replacing Houston and the architect of Houston's plan. Even though William "looked" white, he never lied about his race in order to have an easier life. Which was not an interest of Thurgood Marshall's? Identify your study strength and weaknesses. At a basic level I view the Spell case as a premonition of the kinds of challenges that the NAACP would face in the absence of de jure segregation, Sharfstein says. Thurgood Marshall's school days didn't exactly indicate Future Supreme Court Justice. In August 1947, he tried to register his daughters at the white high school. Worried that he would be replaced with a conservative, Thurgood Marshall would tell his clerks, "If I die, prop me up and keep on voting." . Marshall worked at the clinic even as he prepared for the landmark case to integrate the University of Maryland. The danger was very real, since a big part of his job was traveling around the rural South, often alone, to represent people in court. But he was not without his flaws and complexities. T he legal career of Thurgood Marshall the man who became famous arguing cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and in 1967 became the first black A Note to our Readers War of Attrition. WebWhich statement(s) below did Thurgood Marshall use to argue against segregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education? In an interview published on Marshall's website, he said of Hoover, "I never thought he was [racist]. The New York Times, January 25, 1993. Ultimately, however, he retired from the Court in 1991, with plans to "sit on my rear-end." How would you like to learn this content? Stop procrastinating with our study reminders. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked for an extension to file his annual financial disclosure, a move that comes in the wake of a ProPublica He served the civil rights movement in various capacities, both through the cases he argued and the cases he decided. His feast day is on May 17, the day the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down in 1954. Suyat told the Southern Oral History Program. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission. As Thurgood Marshall wrote in his 1948 letter to the editors of The Dallas Morning News, I think that before this country takes up the position that I must demand complete equality of right of citizens of all other countries throughout the world, we must first demonstrate our good faith by showing that in this country our Negro Americans are recognized as full citizens with complete equality.. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Marshall was sworn in to the Supreme Court on October 2, 1967. This article was originally published in 2009., http://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1345/thurgood-marshall. He was far more interested in girls and causing trouble than he was in studying, and at home, he hung out with the tough kids. Thurgood Marshall was an attorney for the NAACP and the first Black Supreme Court Justice. Marshall also consistently sided with public school students in First Amendment cases. Please attempt to sign up again. Marshall went on to fight for teacher pay equality in 10 states across the South. In South Carolina, federal court judge Julius Waties Waring, the scion of a respected Charleston family with deep Confederate roots, issued a series of unexpected decisions in cases tried by Marshall that suggested that federal judges might play a role in protecting civil rights. In the small town of Hearne, Texas, starting in the fall of 1947, the contrast between the U.S. fight against Nazism abroad and its embrace of a rigid racial caste system at home was dramatized in a battle over segregated schools. Marshall was one of the best In 1940, the NAACP founded the Legal Defense and Education Fund with Marshall at the helm. In "Marshall," a new movie starring Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad, the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argues a case for a black man accused of rape. Who appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. The Hearne lawsuit was one of a cadre of small, unsuccessful cases extending back to Marshalls late 1930s schoolteacher-pay-equality cases in Maryland and Virginia. In this position, he traveled to dangerous areas in the South to investigate cases involving lynchings, voting rights, and fair trials. Abstract. When he was named a Supreme Court Justice in 1967, Thurgood Marshall became part of the system King was trying to fight. Greenhouse, Linda. One such case that haunted him was that of the Groveland Four. Many involved schools, but he also tackled racism in other areas, including housing, primary elections, and military justice. He founded the Legal Defense Fund in 1940, which served as the engine in the legal battles of the Civil Rights Movement. Freedom's Ring: King's "I Have a Dream" Speech, Supreme Court issues Brown v. Board of Education decision. According to Baltimore Magazine, in 1938, Marshall became the NAACP's chief legal counsel replacing Houston and the architect of Houston's plan. After graduating from Lincoln University with honors in 1930, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. But he grew frustrated with the Court in the 1980s and announced his retirement in 1991. Then, in 2010, President Barack Obama nominated one of Marshalls former clerks to the Supreme Court. Read on to learn about Thurgood Marshall's impact on the civil rights movement and the significance of the cases he both argued and decided. Houston preached about the possibility of fighting discrimination using existing laws and introduced Marshall to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored of People (NAACP) meetings. Cases at the white high school classmates was Langston Hughes who would go to. 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