Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908, Marshall attended Lincoln University and Howard University School of Law. He married Vivian Burey in 1929. In 1936, he went to work with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, at the NAACP. They argued and won a number of major civil rights victories in education and, in 1940, Marshall founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and became its first director-counsel. In this role, he travelled to South Carolina many times to plan and argue cases about teacher salaries, voting rights, and school desegregation.
(Right) Following the Brown decision, Thurgood Marshall pressed white leaders in Clarendon County for an update on the progress toward school desegregation. There was none.
Courtesy of Robert McCormick Figg, Jr. Papers, South Caroliniana Library
(Left) Thurgood Marshall travelled to South Carolina numerous times to meet with plaintiffs and lawyers on the Briggs case.
Courtesy of Joseph A. De Laine Papers, South Caroliniana Library
Working with South Carolina attorney Harold Boulware, Marshall served first as the lawyer for Levi Pearson’s suit for buses for African American students and then for the broader cases asking for equal school facilities and school desegregation, such as Briggs v. Elliott. Marshall and the NAACP took the case to the United States Supreme Court, where the Court combined Briggs with other cases from across the country, taking the name of a case from Topeka, Kansas – Brown v. Board of Education. In 1952 and again in 1953, a series of lawyers argued the cases in front of the court, with Marshall presenting the South Carolina case. In his arguments, Marshall relied on the work of social scientists, including the doll studies of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, to show the harms of segregation on Black children. The NAACP was successful: the Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional on May 17, 1954.
Marshall remained director-counsel and lawyer for the LDF until 1961, when President John F. Kennedy appointed him as a judge of the Second District of the United States Court of Appeals. In 1965, he became the Solicitor General of the United States, arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. He served in that role for two years until, in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court, making him the first African American to serve on the nation’s highest court. He served on the court until his retirement in 1991. He died in 1993.
