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.
Thurgood MarshallThurgood 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 Court's first African-American justice.
sevenFrom 1935 to 1948, he argued eight cases before the Supreme Court, winning seven of them.
Macon Bolling AllenMacon Bolling AllenResting placeCharleston, South CarolinaOther namesAllen Macon BollingOccupationLawyer, judgeKnown forFirst African-American lawyer and Justice of the Peace4 more rows
Thurgood MarshallOn June 13, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated distinguished civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Charles Hamilton HoustonThurgood Marshall was one of the architects of Brown v. Board of Education, and was the lead counsel arguing against the separate but equal rule of Plessy v. Ferguson. Charles Hamilton Houston was his mentor at and after Marshall attended Howard University School of Law.
Charles Hamilton Houston, (born September 3, 1895, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 22, 1950, Washington, D.C.), American lawyer and educator instrumental in laying the legal groundwork that led to U.S. Supreme Court rulings outlawing racial segregation in public schools.
Appointed to the NAACP's highest administrative post during the early stage of the Civil Rights Movement, Wilkins directed the organization on a course that sought equal rights for blacks through legal redress. In August 1963 he helped organize and later addressed the historic civil rights March on Washington.
Under Houston, the law school graduated a group of highly effective civil rights lawyers, the most illustrious of whom was Thurgood Marshall.
One of the most influential figures in African American life between the two world wars was Charles Hamilton Houston. A scholar and lawyer, he dedicated his life to freeing his people from the bonds of racism. Houston played a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws, which earned him the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".
Mordecai Johnson, the first African-American president of Howard University, named Charles Houston to head the law school in 1929. Houston brought an ambitious vision to the school, he set out to train attorneys who would become civil rights advocates. At the time, courses were offered only part-time and in the evening. Houston created an accredited, full-time program with an intensified civil rights curriculum. In Houston's capacity as Dean, he had a direct influence on nearly one-quarter of all the black lawyers in the United States, including former student Thurgood Marshall. Houston transformed a second-rate law school into a first class institution that churned out generations of brilliant black lawyers. His determination to train world-class lawyers who would lead the fight against racial injustice gave African Americans an invaluable weapon in the civil rights struggle.
t. e. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States and elsewhere within the United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat -dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people ...
Jim Crow laws and Jim Crow state constitutional provisions mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains between white and black people. The U.S. military was already segregated.
Racial Etiquette: The Racial Customs and Rules of Racial Behavior in Jim Crow America – The basics of Jim Crow etiquette. "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!". PBS documentary on first Freedom Ride, in 1947. List of laws enacted in various states.
Although sometimes counted among "Jim Crow laws" of the South, statutes such as anti-miscegenation laws were also passed by other states. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (the Warren Court) in a unanimous ruling Loving v. Virginia (1967). Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."
This was not the first time this happened – for example, Parks was inspired by 15-year-old Claudette Colvin doing the same thing nine months earlier – but the Parks act of civil disobedience was chosen, symbolically, as an important catalyst in the growth of the Civil Rights Movement; activists built the Montgomery bus boycott around it, which lasted more than a year and resulted in desegregation of the privately run buses in the city. Civil rights protests and actions, together with legal challenges, resulted in a series of legislative and court decisions which contributed to undermining the Jim Crow system.
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of African Americans.
The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to " Jump Jim Crow ", a song-and-dance caricature of black people performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface , which first surfaced in 1828 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson 's populist policies.
About Jim Crow. 2014 1. Introduction. The Jim Crow era ended nearly 50 years ago with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which restored African-Americans to full citizenship in the United States after a century of legalized oppression. As the era fades deeper and deeper into the past, ...
Jim Crow was an entire way of life dedicated to asserting and maintaining the superiority of whites over blacks. The Jim Crow system dominated the southern and border states, though Jim Crow laws and attitudes could be found in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West as well.
Blacks were denied the franchise in many ways. Dr. Russell Booker of America’s Black Holocaust Museum has identified eight methods used to deny blacks the right to vote7: All-white primary elections:In the United States, there are usually two rounds of elections: first the primary, then the general.
Blacks were reduced to second-class citizenship. They were denied the right to vote, kept separate from whites in most phases of life, and in general, treated as if they were subhuman, in an effort to justify white supremacy and keep the black population under tight control.
Social institutions were structured to reinforce the organizing principle of the culture: that blacks were inherently inferior to whites, in effect subhuman.
to those whose grandfathers had been able to vote, to those with ‘good characters,’ to those who paid poll taxes. In 1896, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters. Eight years later, only 1,342, one percent, could pass the state’s new rules.5. Segregation.
The Reconstruction era ended with the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election.
Chief Justice Earl Warren was a skilled negotiator, and garnered a unanimous decision in which the Court ruled that "'separate but equal' has no place" in America's public schools, as separate was deemed inherently unequal. Jim Crow was suddenly at odds with the law of the country, and openly threatened white supremacy.
In Sweatt, a case against the University of Texas Law School, the Court ruled that the black facilities provided by the university did not meet the standard of equality, so black students could not be excluded from the white facilities.
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) ruled that a state court could not constitutionally restrict an American from occupying a property on the basis of race , desegregating housing.
A black student, Lloyd Gaines, was denied admission to the white-only State University of Missouri Law School, so he took legal action. The Court affirmed Plessy (6-2), and did not require Missouri to accept Gaines at the Law school.
By legally making the maintenance of segregation an expensive and complicated alternative to integration, Gaines was the first of a series of cases that led to the overturning of Plessy. Thurgood Marshall, NAACP Counsel and civil rights leader, coordinated several key victories before the Supreme Court that resulted in the dismantling of Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was suddenly at odds with the law of the country, and openly threatened white supremacy. Though the legality of Jim Crow in education had been defeated, blacks continued to struggle for equal rights in its wake.