Thurgood Marshall and other
lawyers celebrating the May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education victory.
Thurgood Marshall
(July 2, 1908 - January 24, 1993)
AUDIO:
Thurgood Marshall -- speaking in 1978 at Howard University Law
School about Segregation and Civil Rights:
Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. His original name was Thoroughgood but he shortened it to Thurgood in second grade. His
father, William Marshall, instilled in him an appreciation for the
United States Constitution and the rule of law. Additionally, as a
child, he was punished for his school misbehavior by being forced to
read the Constitution, which he later said piqued his interest in the
document. Marshall was the grandson of a slave.
Marshall graduated from
Lincoln University, PA in
1930.
Afterward, Marshall wanted to apply to his hometown law school at the
University of Maryland School of Law, but the dean told him that he
shouldn't bother because he would not be accepted due to the school's
segregation policy. Later, as a civil rights litigator, he
successfully sued the school for this policy in the case Murray v.
Pearson. Instead, Marshall sought admission and was accepted at
Howard University. He was influenced by its dynamic new dean,
Charles Hamilton Houston, who instilled in his students the desire
to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans.
Marshall
received his law degree from Howard in 1933, and set up
a private practice in Baltimore. The following year, he
began working with the Baltimore
NAACP. He won his first major civil rights case,
Murray v. Pearson, 169 Md. 478 (1936).
This involved the first attempt to chip away at
Plessy v. Ferguson, a plan created by his
co-counsel on the case
Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall represented
Donald Gaines Murray, a black Amherst College
graduate with excellent credentials who had been denied
admission to the University of Maryland Law School
because of its separate but equal policies. This policy
required black students to accept one of three options,
attend:
Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or
out-of-state black institutions. In
1935, Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Murray,
showing that neither of the in-state institutions
offered a law school and that such schools were entirely
unequal to the University of Maryland. Marshall and
Houston expected to lose and intended to appeal to the
federal courts. The
Maryland Court of Appeals ruled against the state of
Maryland and its Attorney General, who represented the
University of Maryland, stating "Compliance with the
Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the
state. Whatever system is adopted for legal education
now must furnish equality of treatment now". Because the
state did not appeal the ruling in the federal courts,
this state ruling under the U.S. Constitution was the
first to overturn Plessy. While it was a moral
precedent, it had no authority outside the state of
Maryland.
Marshall
won his first Supreme Court case,
Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S.
227 (1940).
That same year, he was
appointed Chief counsel for the NAACP.
He argued many other cases before the
Supreme Court, most of them
successfully. His most famous case
as a lawyer was
Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) in which the Supreme Court
eradicated the "separate
but equal" doctrine in public education.
President
John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall
to the
United States Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit in
1961. A group of
Democratic Party Senators led by
Mississippi's
James Eastland and West Virginia's
Robert Byrd held up his
confirmation, so he served for the first
several months under a
recess appointment. Marshall
remained on that court until
1965, when President
Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him
Solicitor General.
On
June 13,
1967, President Johnson appointed
Marshall to the Supreme Court following
the retirement of Justice
Tom C. Clark, saying that this was
"the right thing to do, the right time
to do it, the right man and the right
place." Marshall served on the Court for
the next twenty-four years, compiling a
liberal record that included strong
support for Constitutional protection of
individual rights, especially the rights
of criminal suspects against the
government.
(Biographical
Information obtained from Wikipedia)
_____________________________________________________________________________
Charles Hamilton
Houston (September 3, 1895–April 22, 1950)
Charles Hamilton Houston led the legal strategy
leading to the end of legalized racial segregation in the United States. He and
those he taught and mentored laid the legal groundwork that ultimately led to
the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Houston died four years before full fruition of
his work to end "separate but equal" as a valid constitutional principle.
Houston completed high school at the age of 15 and graduated
as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1915.
He then taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for two years until the
onset of World War I whereupon Houston enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Europe as a second lieutenant in field artillery.
As a result of some of his experiences in the segregated and
racist army, Houston decided that he needed to become an advocate to enforce the
legal rights of the oppressed. In pursuit of this,3 following his honorable
discharge from the army in 1919, Houston enrolled at Harvard Law School from
which he earned his Bachelor of Laws in 1922 and a doctorate in 1923. Houston
was a stellar student and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law
Review. He studied law at the University of Madrid until 1924 when he returned
to Washington, DC, and joined his father's law practice.
Houston is recognized as the architect behind the ultimate success of the
long struggle to end legalized discrimination and, in particular, the "separate
but equal" doctrine accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v.
Ferguson. Houston, together with a select group of mostly Howard lawyers,
including
Thurgood Marshall, and working through the NAACP and later the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, created a number of precedents that ultimately led
to the dismantling of de jure discrimination after Brown v. Board
of Education in 1954, four years after his death. Among the major steps
were
Pearson v. Murray (1936) and
State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939). In Pearson Houston and
Thurgood Marshall established in the Maryland highest court that the University
of Maryland could not exclude African Americans as it had excluded Marshall just
a few years earlier. In Gaines this principle was extended to the
entire country when the U.S. Supreme Court held that Missouri could not exclude
blacks from the state law school since there was no comparable, and could be no
comparable school for African Americans because of the unique intangibles of a
legal education, in Missouri. Ultimately this precedent was extended to other
schools and ultimately down to public primary and secondary education.
___________________________________________________________________________
Other Attorneys Involved in the Brown v. Board
Case
Organizations Involved in Brown v. Board
NAACP
LEGAL DEFENSE FUND
National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
HOME
