And in the complexity and strife of Americas remarkable 20th century, no one did more to open doors for others than Thurgood Marshall. Marshall with his wife, Cecilia, and their sons, Thurgood Jr. and John, outside the Supreme Court in 1967, shortly after he was confirmed as a justice. His punishment? ), U.S. jurist and civil-rights advocate. While Marshall did not write the Courts opinion in Tinker, he made his presence felt at oral argument with his incisive questioning of the school boards attorney. Create your account. Thurgood Marshall. For once the Judge had broken his word, because he didnt make the inauguration either. This separating of people based on their skin color was known as segregation. All rights reserved. Bush all appointed justices with conservative legal views, and Marshall became known for his eloquent dissents, which criticized his colleagues failures to fully address racial and other injustices and pointed out the real-world ramifications of their opinions. Marshall said that he would have been lynched if not for the arrival of his colleagues. The secrecy of the internal work of the chambers was a sacred trust. Small wonder that in 1977, he provided the key fifth vote to allow the Nazis to march in Skokie. I would call him the greatest lawyer of the twentieth century., 2023 Minute Media - All Rights Reserved. Marshall recalled of Houston, "He would not be satisfied until he went to a dance on the campus and found all of his students sitting around the wall reading law books instead of partying.". Known as Mr. The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis. He hated the term black back then spelled with a lowercase B which had often been an opprobrious way of talking about the people to whose fight for equality hed devoted his life. 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. Marshall, in his opinion for the Court, wrote, The problem in any case is to arrive at a balance between the interests of the teacher, as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees., He also wrote the Courts majority opinion in Rankin v. McPherson (1987), in which the Court ruled, 5-4, that a Texas constable violated the First Amendment rights of a clerical employee for making an intemperate remark about President Ronald Reagan after John Hinckley Jr. shot and wounded the president. That Marshalls hearings werent televised was a blessing, because had this nonsense been broadcast to the nation, goodness knows how the vote would have come out. Encyclopedia Table of Contents | Case Collections | Academic Freedom | Recent News, Justice Thurgood Marshall in the 1970s. He had received such a poor education that he neither knew what it was nor how to properly eat it. He wrote the Courts opinion in, Marshalls was a consistent liberal voice on a Court that was increasingly conservative. An example: When I went to work for him in the summer of 1980, the Judge was still using Negro to refer to the race. On June 13, 1967 President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court. She had been heard, and she had seen the chief judge of the Court of Appeals yell at the governments lawyer on her behalf. Marshalls commitment to the First Amendment extended to prison inmates. On August 30, 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Marshall aruged Brown v. He would remind us of the hoops the Jim Crow judges made him and the other N.A.A.C.P. Yet, the discrepancy in the caliber of education for whites and blacks was made all too apparent to him when, one day while traveling with Houston, Marshall witnessed a black child biting into an orange. Thurgood Marshall Famous Quotes Thurgood Marshall had seen some of the worst times of his life, and was a victim of racism, discrimination, and injustice in America. Fred Graham, writing in The Times, argued that because there existed widespread agreement that it was improper to discuss the nominees ideological position on current issues, the hearings tended to degenerate into exercises in political flapdoodle that detract from the dignity of both the Senate and the nominee.. He earned an undergraduate degree from Lincoln University in 1930 and a law degree from Howard University Law School in 1933. The governor called Marshall on the phone and said: See? Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer who was appointed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1967. Back in Columbia, he was hauled before a justice of the peace. Many of his tales involved what he called playing cards and drinking whiskey. And who were his card-playing, whiskey-drinking partners? Marshall had been chipping away at the legal basis of segregation in secondary education for years. Fortunately, at that moment, a stranger happened into the mens room, saw our heros dilemma and gave him a quarter. Best Known For: Thurgood Marshall was instrumental in ending legal segregation and became the first African American justice of the Supreme Court. He died on January 24, 1993. In 1969, the radical Belgian economist Ernest Mandel was invited to speak at Stanford University. Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. In his concurring opinion in Procunier v. Martinez (1974), a case examining the constitutionality of Californias prison mail regulations, Marshall emphasized the importance of freedom of expression to the human spirit: The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit a spirit that demands self-expression. Marshall wrote, Vigilance is necessary to ensure that public employers do not use authority over employees to silence discourse, not because it hampers public functions but simply because superiors disagree with the content of employees speech., Marshalls powerful language in Police Department of Chicago v. Mosley (1972) ushered in the Courts content discrimination principle, which became the Courts chief methodological tool for deciding free expression cases. In the aftermath of Marshall's death, an obituary read: "We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall.". In one of Marshall's first cases which he argued alongside his mentor, Charles Houston he defended another well-qualified undergraduate, Donald Murray, who like himself had been denied entrance to the University of Maryland Law School. He played roulette, he played blackjack. He was not about to treat me any differently from anyone else just because he knew my deceased grandmother decades earlier. So our hero, having lost all his money, went into the restroom, only to discover that you had to pay to use the stalls. After graduating from law school, Marshall started working on civil rights cases to fight for equality for African Americans. Thurgood Marshall was nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson on June 13, 1967 to fill the seat being vacated by Tom C. Clark.Per the Constitution of the United States, the nomination was subject to the advice and consent of the United States Senate, which holds the determinant power to confirm or reject . There, Marshall's father a waiter introduced him to the courtroom at an early age, taking him and his brother to watch trials as a hobby. All Rights Reserved. There is a celebration planned Sunday at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Thurgood Marshall studied the Constition when he was a boy. The content discrimination principle determined whether a regulation discriminated against speech because of the content of its message. Thurgood Marshall was married twice, first to Vivian Burey from 1929 to her death in February 1955 and later to Cecilia Suyat from December 1955 until his death. The press went wild. While Spell initially confessed to the crime after 16 hours of interrogation, he later said the encounter was consensual. The intimidation was more than mere background noise. He was Black, so by definition he could not possibly be up to the job. Colossal gravitational waves found for the first time. After a few months, the head of the agency called him up. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them, and participated in hundreds of other cases in lower courts nationwide. We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we're winning. As Marshall told the story, Lumbard, without a word to anyone else, put the womans appeal on the calendar for oral argument. (Justice Marshall was a devoted fan of Days of Our Lives and as solicitor general was known to drink bourbon and tell stories full of lies with President Lyndon Johnson.) Justice Marshall said of his father in 1965, He never told me to be a lawyer, but he turned me into one.. All rights reserved. Starring Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad and Kate Hudson, the movie focuses on an obscure 1941 rape case brought by Eleanor Strubing, a 32-year-old white woman, against her 32-year-old Black chauffeur, Joseph Spell. anyway, the rest of the tale is what matters: The sun has never set on a live nigger in this town. At that point, with his audience sick with disgust and full of dread, the Judge would laugh: So I tucked my constitutional rights in my pocket and got the hell out of Dodge!. All rights reserved. He was angry about President John F. Kennedys decision to postpone introducing civil rights legislation to avoid harming the rest of his agenda and would later question his dedication to the cause of equality. In "Marshall," a new movie starring Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad, the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argues a case for a black man accused of rape. He was too close to the F.B.I. Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Byron White, Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun disagreed, saying "government may take race into account when it acts not to demean or insult any racial group . Instead, he slipped a consoling arm around his old friends shoulders and led him toward the robing room. (I refused to speak or write publicly about the Judge until the mid-1980s, when he gave me explicit permission.). A couple of years before his retirement, the Judge switched to Afro-American, but he never seemed comfortable with the term. But Marhsall was born on July 2, 1908, in Maryland, a time when Black people were discriminated against in southern states. His mother, Norma Arica Williams, an elementary school teacher for 25 years, placed great emphasis on his overall scholarship. You wont like the way I fix it, but Ill fix it., A few days later, the trustees of the state hospital system met. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. The plaintiff was well known in New Yorks federal courts because she filed complaints regularly, the sort of complaints that claim that the government has installed electrodes in the plaintiffs brain to steal her ideas for television shows things like that. He pressed on and won. During Elena Kagans confirmation hearing, senators questioned her connection to Marshall and criticized his record. But it cannot build bridges. (Marshall could scarcely have imagined that 18 years later, he himself would be Clarks successor.) Never mind that he graduated first in his class at Howard University School of Law. Just before dinner, his wife, Cissy, introduced us. During his nearly four years on the appellate bench, he wrote 112 majority opinions without a single reversal. Thurgood Marshall was the first African American Supreme Court justice. Yet the Judge was hardly blind to the imperfections of the legal system. She anchors the 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. newscasts with Rick Ritter. He was confirmed as an Associate Justice by the United States Senate by a vote of 69-11 on August 30, 1967. And many of his most well-known legal battles were fought against discrimination in public education, like Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Of course, the opposition, led by Southern Democrats, worried most about how he would vote as a justice. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was a giant of the civil rights movement, and his impressive achievements number in the dozens. Marshall also consistently sided with public school students in First Amendment cases. Marshall fought to make ends meet as a young lawyer. Among his current projects is a book about the people outside his family from whom he learned the most; one of them was Thurgood Marshall. But probably his best known case was Brown vs. Board of Education, which challenged school segregation, when white and Black students are forced to go to separate schools. Only rarely did he see his opponents as evil; most were simply misguided. Naturally, I assumed that the Judge would heap hellfire and damnation upon Daviss head. At the same time, the case established Marshall as one of the most successful and prominent lawyers in America. And although his name is synonymous with the civil rights battles of the 1950s, Marshall was also at the forefront of debates about police brutality, womens rights, and the death penalty. 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. The changes which are to be won must be won, he told the audience, but they must be achieved through law. As for those who considered legal change too slow, Marshall politely disagreed: The law is not always the fastest or the shortest road to justice, but we must take it nevertheless., His faith in human reasonableness was nearly as great, and at times it could make him sound nave. In 1967, President Johnson nominated Marshall to serve on the bench before which he had successfully argued so many times before the United States Supreme Court. Astrological Sign: Cancer, Colored High and Training School (Frederick Douglass High School).