Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Thurgood Marshall was the grandson

of a slave. His father, William Marshall, instilled in him from youth an appreciation

for the United States Constitution and the rule of law. After completing high School

in 1925, Thurgood followed his brother, William Aubrey Marshall, at the historically

black Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His classmates at Lincoln

included a distinguished group of future Black leaders such as the poet and author

Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician

Cab Calloway. Just before graduation, he married his first wife, Vivian “Buster”

Burey. Their twenty-five year marriage ended with her death from cancer in 1955.

n 1930, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied

admission because he was Black. This was an event that was to haunt him

and direct his future professional life. Thurgood sought admission and

was accepted at the Howard University Law School that same year and

came under the immediate influence of the dynamic new dean, Charles

Hamilton Houston, who instilled in all of his students the desire to

apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans. Paramount in

Houston’s outlook was the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme

Court ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson which established the legal doctrin

e called, “separate but equal.” Marshall’s first major court case came

in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to

admit a young African American Amherst University graduate

named Donald Gaines Murray. Applauding Marshall’s victory,

author H.L. Mencken wrote that the decision of denial by the

University of Maryland Law School was “brutal and absurd,” and

they should not object to the “presence among them of a

self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well

prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college.”

hurgood Marshall followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Hamilton

Houston to New York and later became Chief Counsel for the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During this

period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United

Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of

Ghana and what is now Tanzania. It was felt that the person who so

successfully fought for the rights of America’s oppressed minority would

be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the White citizens in these

two former European colonies. After amassing an impressive record of

Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including

the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy

appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second

Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support fo

r the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving

illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues.

Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, “none of his

(Marshall’s) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court

.” In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office

of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United

States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 case

s he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Indeed,

Thurgood Marshall represented and won more cases before the United States

Supreme Court than any other American.

Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall

established a record for supporting the voiceless American. Having

honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he

developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of

racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court

Justice, Thurgood Marshall leaves a legacy that expands that early

sensitivity to include all of America’s voiceless. Justice Marshall

died on January 24, 1993.