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.
Upon his graduation from Howard, Marshall began the private practice of law in Baltimore. Among his first legal victories was Murray v.
Robert F. Kenne... Who was Thurgood Marshall? An influential lawyer who rose through ranks during his lifetime, Thurgood Marshall went on to become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving for more than two decades.
Among his first legal victories was Murray v. Pearson (1935), in which Marshall successfully sued the University of Maryland for denying an African American applicant admission to its law school simply on the basis of race.
Thurgood Marshall's Family Marshall was born to Norma A. Marshall and William Canfield on July 2, 1908. His parents were mulatottes, which are people classified as being at least half white. Norma and William were raised as “Negroes” and each taught their children to be proud of their ancestry.
She would be the first justice ever to have served as a public defender. The last justice with experience representing criminal defendants was Thurgood Marshall, the trailblazing former NAACP lawyer, who retired in 1991.
PoliticianJuristFederal judgeThurgood Marshall/Professions
Thurgood MarshallOccupation: Lawyer and Supreme Court Justice.Born: July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland.Died: January 24, 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland.Best known for: Becoming the first African-American Supreme Court Justice.
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. He is best known for arguing the historic 1954 Brown v.
Life as a Lawyer Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Marshall was recognized as a one of the top attorneys in the United States, winning 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. Some of Marshall's notable cases included: Chambers v.
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall was the first African American to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He joined the Court in 1967, the year this photo was taken.
Known for his earlier work in helping end legal segregation through the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, he once described his judicial approach by simply saying, "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up."
Sandra Day O'ConnorAs the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, Sandra Day O'Connor became an inspiration to millions.
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.
Thurgood Marshall had a fresh, passionate voice and became a champion of civil rights, both on the bench and through almost 30 Supreme Court victories before his appointment, during times of severe racial strains. Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908, to Norma Arica and William Canfield Marshall.
Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education (1950). Having won these cases, and thus, establishing precedents for chipping away Jim Crow laws in higher education, Marshall succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Marshall, which is based on true events from Marshall's career as a young lawyer, retells the accounts of a rape case, The State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell, in 1940. Below, read more about the cast and who they played in the biopic, which hits theaters Friday.
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.
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall was the first African American to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He joined the Court in 1967, the year this photo was taken. On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall took the judicial oath of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first Black person to serve on the Court.
The real black superhero carries a briefcase filled with law books and a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his jacket pocket. His name is Thurgood Marshall.
After graduating from law school , Marshall started a private law practice in Baltimore. He began his 25-year affiliation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1934 by representing the organization in the law school discrimination suit Murray v. Pearson. In 1936, Marshall became part of the national staff of the NAACP.
Education. Lincoln University, Pennsylvania ( BA) Howard University ( LLB) Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the first African-American ...
Marshall was married twice. He married Vivian "Buster" Burey in 1929. After her death in February 1955, Marshall married Cecilia Suyat in December of that year. They were married until he died in 1993, having two sons together: Thurgood Marshall Jr., a former top aide to President Bill Clinton; and John W. Marshall, a former United States Marshals Service Director and Virginia Secretary of Public Safety.
Board of Education. Marshall died of heart failure at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on January 24, 1993, at the age of 84. After he lay in repose in the Great Hall of the United States Supreme Court Building, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940). That same year, he founded and became the executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. As the head of the Legal Defense Fund, he argued many other civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully, including Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950). His most historic case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that " separate but equal " public education, as established by Plessy v. Ferguson, was not applicable to public education because it could never be truly equal. In total, Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.
Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Justice by a Senate vote of 69–11 on August 30, 1967 (32–1 in the Senate Republican Conference and 37–10 in the Senate Democratic Caucus) with 20 members voting present or abstaining. He was the 96th person to hold the position, and the first African American.
Henry Highland Garnet School (P.S. 103), where Marshall attended elementary school. Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. He was descended from enslaved peoples on both sides of his family. He was named Thoroughgood after a great-grandfather, but later shortened it to Thurgood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Immediately after graduation, Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore , and in the early 1930s, he represented the local NAACP chapter in a successful lawsuit that challenged the University of Maryland Law School over its segregation policy. In addition, he successfully brought lawsuits that integrated other state universities.
Board of Education, which he argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, finally overturning “separate but equal” and acknowledging that segrega tion greatly diminished students’ self-esteem.
To fail to do so is to ensure that America will forever remain a divided society.”. In particular, Marshall fervently dissented in cases in which the Supreme Court upheld death sentences; he wrote over 150 opinions dissenting from cases in which the Court refused to hear death penalty appeals.
Among Marshall’s salient majority opinions for the Supreme Court were: Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza, in 1968, which determined that a mall was “public forum” and unable to exclude picketers; Stanley v. Georgia, in 1969, held that pornography, when owned privately, could not be prosecuted.
He served as Associate Justice from 1967-1991 after being nominated by President Johnson. Marshall retired from the bench in 1991 and passed away on January 24, 1993, in Washington D.C. at the age of 84. Civil rights and social change came about through meticulous and persistent litigation efforts, at the forefront of which stood Thurgood Marshall ...
On the appointment, President Johnson later said that Marshall’s nomination was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.”.
Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Marshall, railroad porter, who later worked on the staff of Gibson Island Club, a white-only country club and Norma Williams, a school teacher. One of his great-grandfathers had been taken as a slave from the Congo to Maryland where he was eventually freed.
Thurgood Marshall is best remembered for his jurisprudence in the arena of civil rights and criminal proceedings. During his time as the Justice of the Supreme Court, he accumulated a liberal record that involved strong backing for Constitutional protection of individual rights, especially the rights of criminal suspects. He was also instrumental in changing the laws, pertaining to ‘segregation’ and other liberal interpretations of controversial social issues. One of his major works today is his decision to support the right to abortion in the landmark 1973 case, ‘Roe v. Wade’, among many others.
An influential lawyer who rose through ranks during his lifetime, Thurgood Marshall went on to become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving for more than two decades. Holding prominent offices such as Solicitor General and Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, ...
After his death, a number of memorials were built in his honor, including the one that stands at Lawyers Mall. The Thurgood Marshall Center, the Thurgood Marshall Law Library and the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport are some of the centers/places named after him.
In 1940, he won his first U.S. Supreme Court ‘Chambers v. Florida’ case at the age of 32. He was also appointed as the Chief Counsel for the NAACP the same year. The 1940s was an extremely crucial period for Marshall as he fought a number of cases, winning most of them including the ‘Smith v.
Oklahoma State Regents’ case and the ‘Sweatt v. Painter’ case. In 1951, he travelled to South Korea and Japan to examine charges of racism in the U.S. Armed Forces. He earned his breakthrough as a lawyer when he fought the ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ case at Topeka, in 1954.
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the U.S. Supreme Court's first African American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education.
Marshall is portrayed by Sidney Poitier in the 1991 two-part television miniseries, Separate but Equal, depicting the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. In 2006, Thurgood, a one-man play written by George Stevens Jr., premiered at the Westport Country Playhouse, starring James Earl Jones and directed by Leonard Foglia. Later it opened Broadway at the Booth Theatre on April 30, 2008, starring Laurence Fishburne.
On February 24, 2011, HBO screened a filmed version of the play which Fishburne performed at the John F. Kenne…
Marshall was married twice. He married Vivian "Buster" Burey in 1929. After her death in February 1955, Marshall married Cecilia Suyat in December of that year. They were married until he died in 1993, having two sons together: Thurgood Marshall Jr., a former top aide to President Bill Clinton; and John W. Marshall, a former United States Marshals Service Director and Virginia Secretary of Public Safety.
In 1993, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico instituted the annual Thurgood Marshall Award, given to the top student in civil rights at each of Puerto Rico's four law schools. It includes a $500 monetary award. The awardees are selected by the Commonwealth's Attorney General.