Thurgood Marshall’s cases fall into two chapters: the ones he argued as a lawyer and the ones he decided as a Supreme Court justice. As lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29, dismantling the legal architecture of segregation piece by piece. After President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Court in 1967, Marshall spent 24 terms writing opinions and dissents on privacy, the death penalty, school funding, and race-conscious admissions.1National Archives Foundation. Justice Thurgood Marshall: First African American Supreme Court Justice The cases below are the ones that mattered most.
Cases He Argued as an NAACP Lawyer
Murray v. Pearson (1936)
Donald Gaines Murray, a Black graduate of Amherst College, was denied admission to the University of Maryland School of Law solely because of his race. Maryland offered out-of-state scholarships to Black students in place of admission and argued that arrangement satisfied its constitutional duties. Marshall, co-counseling with Charles Hamilton Houston, argued that shipping students across state lines was no substitute for equal legal education inside Maryland.2Maryland State Law Library. Pearson et al v. Murray
The Maryland Court of Appeals agreed. The law school was a state agency subject to the Fourteenth Amendment, and because no comparable in-state law school existed for Black students, Maryland had to admit Murray. The case never reached the U.S. Supreme Court, but it gave Marshall a template he would use across the South.
Sweatt v. Painter (1950)
When Heman Sweatt, a Black mail carrier, applied to the University of Texas Law School, the state hurriedly created a separate law school for Black students rather than admit him. Marshall compared the two schools in detail. Texas had 16 full-time professors, 850 students, a library of 65,000 volumes, and a deep alumni network. The new school had five professors, 23 students, a library of 16,500 volumes, and exactly one alumnus admitted to the Texas Bar.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950)
A unanimous Supreme Court ruled the separate school did not provide equal education. The justices looked past physical resources to faculty reputation, alumni influence, and the ability to interact with the lawyers and judges a student would eventually practice alongside. Matching square footage and book counts was not enough.
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950)
Decided the same day as Sweatt, this case attacked a subtler form of segregation. George McLaurin had been admitted to the University of Oklahoma’s graduate education program under a court order, but the university made him sit in a designated row in classrooms, use a separate library table, and eat at a separate cafeteria table. Oklahoma argued it was complying with desegregation while still following state laws requiring segregated instruction.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950)
The Court rejected the halfway measure. Those internal restrictions impaired McLaurin’s ability to study, participate, and learn his profession. Once a state admitted a student to a public graduate school, the Fourteenth Amendment required equal treatment inside the building.5Legal Information Institute. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education et al.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Marshall’s most famous case took the logic of Sweatt and McLaurin and applied it to every public school in the country. Representing plaintiffs from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware in consolidated cases, he argued that segregating children by race in elementary and secondary schools was inherently unequal regardless of whether the physical facilities matched.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
The Court agreed unanimously. Chief Justice Warren’s opinion drew on social science research, including psychologist Kenneth Clark’s studies showing segregation damaged Black children’s self-image. “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race,” the Court wrote, “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The decision overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine that had stood since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
Cooper v. Aaron (1958)
After the Governor of Arkansas deployed the National Guard to keep Black students out of Central High School in Little Rock, the local school board asked a federal court to delay its desegregation plan. Marshall argued that state officials could not use the threat of their own resistance as a reason to postpone constitutional rights.
The Court issued an extraordinary opinion signed individually by all nine justices. The rights established in Brown could not be “nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executives or judicial officers, nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes for segregation.”7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958) Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution bound every level of government, closing the door on state efforts to resist desegregation through legal maneuvering.
Smith v. Allwright (1944)
In much of the South, the Democratic primary was the only election that mattered. Texas allowed the Democratic Party to set its own membership rules, and the party passed a resolution limiting participation to white citizens. When Lonnie Smith, a Black voter in Harris County, was turned away from a primary polling place, Marshall took the case to the Supreme Court.8Legal Information Institute. Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)
Texas argued the party was a private organization free to choose its own members. Marshall’s response: because Texas law regulated every aspect of how primaries were conducted and because the primary winner automatically appeared on the general election ballot, the party was performing a government function. That made racial exclusion state action barred by the Fifteenth Amendment.9Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) The Court agreed, and the white primary system collapsed across the South.
Terry v. Adams (1953)
Some jurisdictions tried to sidestep Smith v. Allwright by moving the racial screening earlier in the process. In Fort Bend County, Texas, the Jaybird Democratic Association had run whites-only “pre-primary” elections since 1889. The winners invariably won the official Democratic primary and then the general election. The Jaybirds claimed they were a private club with no connection to the state.
The Supreme Court held that an election process which effectively determined who held public office could not exclude Black voters regardless of how many layers of private organization were wrapped around it. Terry v. Adams closed the last significant legal loophole in the white primary system.
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)
Racially restrictive covenants were clauses written into property deeds that prohibited owners from selling or renting to people of certain races, and they produced sharply segregated neighborhoods across the country. Marshall argued that when state courts enforced these private contracts, the government itself became the agent of discrimination.10Supreme Court of the United States. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)
The Court drew a careful distinction. Private individuals could write whatever discriminatory language they wanted into a deed, and that alone did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the moment a court ordered someone to comply with that covenant, the state was using its power to enforce racial discrimination, and that judicial enforcement violated the Equal Protection Clause.11Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) Racist covenants could still exist on paper, but they were legally unenforceable.
Chambers v. Florida (1940)
Four young Black men were convicted of murder based on confessions extracted through days of relentless questioning without access to lawyers, family, or friends. The interrogation methods were designed to terrorize the suspects into confessing.12Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940)
The Supreme Court reversed the convictions. Confessions obtained through coercion, whether physical force or sustained psychological pressure, could not be used in court because they violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Constitutional protections applied during interrogation, not just at trial.
Lyons v. Oklahoma (1944)
Marshall did not win every case. William Douglas Lyons, a 21-year-old illiterate sharecropper, was beaten with a blackjack for several hours during his initial interrogation. About 11 to 12 hours after the beatings stopped, officers obtained a second confession. The state argued that enough time had passed for the coercion to wear off, making the second confession voluntary.
The Supreme Court sided with Oklahoma in a divided opinion, accepting that the second confession could be separated from the earlier violence. The loss became a reference point for Marshall’s broader argument that courts should look at the totality of how a confession was obtained, not just whether the final statement came during a calm moment.
Majority Opinions as a Justice
Stanley v. Georgia (1969)
Marshall’s best-known majority opinion came early in his tenure. Police officers with a warrant to search Robert Stanley’s home for gambling evidence found no gambling materials but did find films they deemed obscene under Georgia law. Stanley was prosecuted for possessing obscene material in his own home.
Writing for a unanimous Court, Marshall drew a firm line at the front door. “If the First Amendment means anything,” he wrote, “it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”13Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969) Whatever power the government had to regulate obscenity in public did not reach into a private residence.
Amalgamated Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza (1968)
In one of his first majority opinions, Marshall extended First Amendment protections to private property that served a public function. Union members had picketed a supermarket in a privately owned Pennsylvania shopping center, and the shopping center obtained an injunction under state trespass law. Marshall wrote that because the shopping center functioned as the community’s business district, its owner could not use trespass laws to exclude people exercising their constitutional rights on the premises.14Legal Information Institute. Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 590 et al. v. Logan Valley Plaza, Inc., et al., 391 U.S. 308 (1968) The Court later narrowed this holding in subsequent decisions.
Notable Dissents as a Justice
Furman v. Georgia (1972) and Gregg v. Georgia (1976)
Marshall maintained throughout his tenure that capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. His concurring opinion in Furman v. Georgia contributed to a fractured 5-4 decision that effectively struck down every existing death penalty statute in the country. When the Court reversed course four years later in Gregg v. Georgia and upheld redesigned capital punishment laws, Marshall dissented, writing that the death penalty had “as its very basis the total denial of the wrongdoer’s dignity and worth.” He dissented in every subsequent death penalty case for the rest of his time on the Court.
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973)
The majority held that Texas’s system of funding public schools through local property taxes, which produced vast spending disparities between wealthy and poor districts, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. The Court reasoned that education was not a fundamental right under the Constitution and that wealth was not a suspect classification requiring strict scrutiny.
Marshall’s dissent was scathing. He argued that the right to education was tied to other constitutional rights, including free speech and voting. “The right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned,” he wrote, “is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record.” The dissent has influenced state-level school funding litigation for decades.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978)
The Court struck down a medical school’s rigid racial quota system while allowing race to be considered as one factor in admissions. Marshall wrote separately to argue that the nation’s history of racial discrimination demanded more aggressive remedial measures, not less. His opinion drew directly on the cases he had litigated as an NAACP lawyer, using the long record of state-enforced segregation to argue that race-conscious admissions policies were a necessary response to centuries of exclusion.
Why These Cases Still Matter
The thread running through Marshall’s work, from a Maryland courtroom in 1935 to his final dissent in 1991, was the position that constitutional guarantees meant nothing unless courts enforced them against the people and institutions with the power to deny them. Many of the positions he staked out in dissent, on wealth-based discrimination, the scope of individual privacy, and the limits of government power over citizens, continue to shape legal arguments today.