Thurgood Marshall's best years - tribute to the late United States Supreme Court Justice

American Visions, Oct-Nov, 1993 by August Meier, John Bracey

The public career of Thurgood Marshall can be conveniently divided into two parts: first, his years as a lawyer for the NAACP, from 1935 to 1961, and second, his subsequent years in the federal judicial system, especially his long term on the United States Supreme Court, from 1967 to 1992. Although the two biographies Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench (Birch Lane Press, 1992), by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark, and Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (Little, Brown, 1993), by Carl T. Rowan, devote about equal space to both parts, the earlier period was easily the more important.

The world of Marshall's upbringing - Baltimore, early 1900s - was one in which blacks could vote and public transportation was not segregated. However, after obtaining his A.B. at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, known at the time for its high academic standards, Marshall applied for admission to the University of Maryland Law School and was denied acceptance because of his race.

The world of Marshall's career was characterized by rampant discrimination. In the states south of Maryland, this included denial of the franchise, exclusion from places of public accommodation, Jim Crow and inferior education, lynch law and police brutality. Even in most of the Northern states, blacks could not get service at many hotels and restaurants, and, as in the South, they lived in segregation and substandard housing and faced almost everywhere a virtually impenetrable job ceiling that limited them overwhelmingly to unskilled and menial occupations. Marshall devoted the next 30 years of his life to alleviating these conditions.

He entered Howard University Law School at a critical juncture in the history of the civil rights movement and of the black legal profession. The law school had just come under the leadership of Charles A. Houston, a brilliant constitutional lawyer who had studied at Harvard University. Houston had undertaken the task of turning Howard into a first-rate center for the preparation of specialists in civil rights law.

During Marshall's years at Howard, Houston was working closely with the NAACP to devise a long-range legal strategy to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, and in 1935, Donald Gaines Murray sought the assistance of Marshall and the NAACP in gaining admission to the University of Maryland Law School. Marshall argued the case before the Maryland Court of Appeals and, in a victory touched with irony, won it early the following year.

Within a matter of months, Houston invited Marshall to join him at the NAACP national office, and upon his retirement in 1938, Houston recommended Marshall as his successor. The chief strategy of the NAACP at this time was to undertake litigation to secure for blacks the citizenship rights accorded by the 14th and 15th amendments. Not only was this a difficult uphill battle before the federal courts, but the attempt to bring even a small measure of fairness to the more benighted areas of the South was an extremely dangerous and risky enterprise.

Marshall came perilously close to being lynched by a white mob in 1946 in Columbia, Tenn., an episode that is vividly portrayed in the Rowan biography. It is no understatement to label as radical the actions of Marshall and the NAACP. Today, when legal rights are taken for granted, Marshall's contribution to obtaining them should not be forgotten.

The years 1944 to 1954 mark the heyday of Marshall's career at the NAACP. In a cluster of cases in the mid-1940s, Marshall argued and won three landmark decisions from the Supreme Court: Smith v. Allwright in 1944, outlawing the "white primary"; Morgan v. Virginia in 1946, ruling out segregated seating in interstate transportation; and Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, declaring restrictive covenants in housing deeds to be unenforceable. Also during the late 1940s, Marshall secured victories in several cases involving violation of due process and equal protection in the criminal justice systems in the Southern states.

Then followed a flurry of cases on discrimination in postgraduate professional schools that paved the way for the epochal Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 that explicitly overturned the constitutionality of the separate-but-equal doctrine.

Marshall lost only three of the 22 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. As the two books point out, few, if any, lawyers had such an outstanding record. As head of the overall NAACP legal program, Marshall also presided over a wide range of initiatives at the local and state levels that helped the fight to end discrimination in such areas as criminal justice and public accommodations.

Marshall's success in the courts and the NAACP's successes in securing the passage of civil rights laws in Northern states raised the hopes and aspirations of African Americans. But Supreme Court decisions are not self-enforcing. The awareness that the decisions already won had to be implemented on the ground and that victories in many important areas, such as voting rights, had not yet been achieved led to a sense that other techniques, which came to be known as nonviolent direct action, would speed up the process of social change. At this point, both the strengths and the weaknesses of a strategy based wholly on working within the legal system became evident.