Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer who was appointed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1967. He was the first African American to hold the position and served for 24 years, until 1991. Marshall studied law at Howard University. As counsel to the NAACP, he utilized the judiciary to champion equality for African Americans.
Justice Thurgood Marshall's written opinions on cases, 1960-1999. Cooper v. Aaron (1958) Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966) Miranda v. Arizona (1966) United States v. Guest (1966) Jack Greenberg, who was part of Thurgood Marshall's legal team of seven lawyers involved in arguing "Brown v.
Justice Thurgood Marshall: A Selected Bibliography, ( Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, DC, February 1993). James Jr, Rawn (2010). Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. Bloomsbury Press.
Marshall founded LDF in 1940 and served as its first Director-Counsel. He was the architect of the legal strategy that ended the country's official policy of segregation and was the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.
Chambers v. Florida (1940)Marshall's first victory before the Supreme Court came in Chambers v. Florida (1940), in which he successfully defended four Black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police.
Justice Thurgood MarshallJustice Thurgood Marshall: First African American Supreme Court Justice. On June 13, 1967, President Lyndon B.
Marshall's first victory before the Supreme Court came in Chambers v. Florida (1940), in which he successfully defended four black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police.
Sources. Thurgood Marshall—perhaps best known as the first African American Supreme Court justice—played an instrumental role in promoting racial equality during the civil rights movement. As a practicing attorney, Marshall argued a record-breaking 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them.
Life as a Lawyer. In 1935, Marshall’s first major court victory came in Murray v. Pearson, when he, alongside his mentor Houston, successfully sued the University of Maryland for denying a Black applicant admission to its law school because of his race.
As a practicing attorney, Marshall argued a record-breaking 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them. In fact, Marshall represented and won more cases before the high court than any other person.
Marshall decided to attend Howard University Law School, where he became a protégé of the well-known dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, who encouraged students to use the law as a means for social transformation. In 1933, Marshall received his law degree and was ranked first in his class.
Personally, Marshall suffered a great loss when Vivian, his wife of 25 years, died of cancer in 1955. Shortly after her death, Marshall married Cecilia Suyat, and the couple went on to have two sons together.
His father, William Marshall, was a railroad porter, and his mother, Norma, was a teacher. After he completed high school in 1925, Marshall attended Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Just before he graduated, he married his first wife, ...
Board of Education of Topeka (1954): This landmark case was considered Marshall’s greatest victory as a civil-rights lawyer. A group of Black parents whose children were required to attend segregated schools filed a class-action lawsuit.
Thurgood Marshall, originally Thoroughgood Marshall, (born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died January 24, 1993, Bethesda), lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1967–91) , the Court’s first African American member. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v.
Marshall served on the Supreme Court as it underwent a period of major ideological change.
Throughout the 1940s and ’50s Marshall distinguished himself as one of the country’s top lawyers, winning 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. Among them were cases in which the Court declared unconstitutional a Southern state’s exclusion of African American voters from primary elections ( Smith v.
Ferguson [1896]), but it was Marshall’s reliance on psychological, sociological, and historical data that presumably sensitized the Court to the deleterious effects of institutionalized segregation on the self-image, social worth, and social progress of African American children. Brown v.
Pearson (1935), a suit accusing the University of Maryland of violating the Fourteenth Amendment ’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws by denying an African American applicant admission to its law school solely on the basis of race.
After being rejected by the University of Maryland Law School because he was not white, Marshall attended Howard University Law School; he received his degree in 1933, ranking first in his class.
During Marshall’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he was a steadfast liberal, stressing the need for equitable and just treatment of the country’s minorities by the state and federal governments.
Marshall's most famous case was the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case in which Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren noted, "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.".
After graduating from Howard, one of Marshall's first legal cases was against the University of Maryland Law School in the 1935 case Murray v. Pearson. Working with his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall sued the school for denying admission to Black applicants solely on the basis of race.
During his nearly 25-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Marshall fought for affirmative action for minorities, held strong against the death penalty, and supported of a woman's right to choose if an abortion was appropriate for her.
His mission was equal justice for all. Marshall used the power of the courts to fight racism and discrimination, tear down Jim Crow segregation, change the status quo, and make life better for the most vulnerable in our nation.
Marshall became one of the nation's leading attorneys. He argued 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 29. Some of his notable cases include: Smith v. Allwright (1944), which found that states could not exclude Black voters from primaries. Shelley v.
Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights lawyer who used the courts to fight Jim Crow and dismantle segregation in the U.S. Marshall was a towering figure who became the nation's first Black United States Supreme Court Justice.
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930. He applied to the University of Maryland Law School but was rejected because he was Black. Marshall received his law degree from Howard University Law School in 1933, graduating first in his class.
Marshall studied law at Howard University. As counsel to the NAACP, he utilized the judiciary to champion equality for African Americans. In 1954, he won the Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court ended racial segregation in public schools.
Another crucial Supreme Court victory for Marshall came in the 1944 case of Smith v. Allwright, in which the Court struck down the Democratic Party's use of white people-only primary elections in various Southern states.
The great achievement of Marshall's career as a civil-rights lawyer was his victory in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of Black parents in Topeka, Kansas, whose children were forced to attend all-Black segregated schools. Through Brown v. Board, one of the most important cases of the 20th century, Marshall challenged head-on the legal underpinning of racial segregation, the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Board, one of the most important cases of the 20th century, Marshall challenged head-on the legal underpinning of racial segregation, the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Over several decades, Marshall argued and won a variety of cases to strike down many forms of legalized racism, helping to inspire the American civil rights movement.
Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (later renamed Frederick Douglass High School), where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. The teenage Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker.
Florida (1940), in which he successfully defended four Black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police.
Supreme Court) from October 1967 to October 1991. As a justice in the court, Justice Marshall was a vocal advocate of racial equality, individual, women’s and civil rights.
Thurgood Marshall in 1957. Prior to his appointment to the position of associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Thurgood Marshall made huge waves as a civil rights activist/lawyer. Marshall famously argued numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thurgood Marshall won about 90% of the cases he presented before the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall famously won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. Examples of the famous cases he argued and won before the Supreme Court of the United States include, Shelly v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Sweatt v.
227 (1940), Thurgood Marshall and his associates founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). The fund was aimed at promoting structural and social changes in the community. Marshall hoped that those changes would lead to the elimination of racial disparities, which would in turn create an environment free of racial discrimination. To this day, the LDF, which is currently based in New York City, continues to take on several cases involving minorities in the United States and across the world.
In the end, the Supreme Court passed a verdict on May 17, 1954, which made it unconstitutional for racial segregation in public schools to go on. It was a huge case which caused considerable amount of racial tension in the United States. Marshall was at the heart of it all from start to finish.
Determined to continue his pursuit for racial equality and social transformational laws, Marshall set his sights on creating a successful private law practice after graduating from the Howard University of Law School. After establishing his law firm, Marshall proceeded to form a strong alliance with the National Association for the Advancement of colored People (NAACP).
Kind courtesy to his arguments, the court arrived at a unanimous decision (9-0) and stated that segregation in public schools, regardless of whether the facilities were the same in the segregated schools, resulted in inherently unequal quality.
Below, find links to clear, concise descriptions of each case argued by Thurgood Marshall before the Supreme Court of the United States (1943 - 1961), written by Marilyn Howard, Associate Professor, Humanities.
Jack Greenberg, who was part of Thurgood Marshall's legal team of seven lawyers involved in arguing "Brown v. Board of Education" and he took on many other civil rights cases, died in 2016.
Thurgood Marshall might have been pleased to see a historic wrong acknowledged. On this day in 1967, Marshall was confirmed as the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
For Marshall, King writes, the Groveland case was a self-defining moment, when he placed himself in personal danger to seek justice. It was this spirit that stayed with him as he continued to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, where he was known as “the Great Dissenter.”.
The two remaining men, Greenlee and Irvin, both served prison time. “Despite the fact that Marshall brought the Groveland case before the U.S. Supreme Court, it is barely mentioned in civil rights history, law texts, or the many biographies of Thurgood Marshall,” King writes.
In 1951, Marshall was the director-counsel ...
A young white couple–Willie and Norma Padgett–accused four black men–Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas– of stealing their car and sexually assaulting Norma Padgett, who was in the passenger seat when they drove it away.
Only Irvin survived. Marshall, who was already well known as a lawyer, stepped in when the case went to the Supreme Court–even though another NAACP organizer had already been killed by the Ku Klux Klan over the case, and Marshall was in significant personal danger.