Thurgood Marshall was the civil rights lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education and, in 1967, became the first African American to serve on the United States Supreme Court.1Research file Born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908, he spent more than three decades using the courts to dismantle legalized segregation before President Lyndon B. Johnson placed him on the bench himself. His career ran the full length of the modern civil rights era, from a Baltimore courtroom in the 1930s to twenty-four years as a Supreme Court justice.
The Rejection That Shaped His Career
Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930 and applied to the University of Maryland School of Law. Maryland rejected him solely because of his race. He enrolled instead at Howard University School of Law and graduated first in his class in 1933.
Howard was not a consolation prize. Under Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, the school had become a training ground for civil rights litigation. Houston told his students that a lawyer was either a social engineer or a parasite on society, and he taught them to treat the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as a working tool rather than an abstraction. Marshall later credited Houston with teaching him that “the practice of law could and should serve as a tool for creating equality in society.”
In 1935, Marshall and Houston represented Donald Gaines Murray, a Black applicant turned away from the same University of Maryland law school that had rejected Marshall. They argued that the state could not fund a single public law school and bar an entire race from attending it. A Baltimore court agreed and ordered Murray’s admission; Maryland’s highest court affirmed the ruling in January 1936. The decision bound only Maryland, but it proved that Houston’s strategy worked.
Building the NAACP Legal Campaign
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund was incorporated in 1939, and the Treasury Department granted it tax-exempt status in 1940. Marshall was its first director-counsel. He built the LDF into the most effective civil rights litigation operation in the country, selecting cases with strategic precision and targeting the weakest points in the legal framework supporting segregation.
Two victories from this period kept paying dividends for decades. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), Marshall convinced the Supreme Court that the Texas Democratic Party’s whites-only primary violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court agreed with him that state courts could not enforce racially restrictive housing covenants.
Over his career with the NAACP, Marshall argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them. He built that record while traveling through the Jim Crow South, often facing threats of physical violence and sleeping in supporters’ homes because hotels would not admit him.
Brown v. Board of Education
Everything Marshall and Houston had built pointed toward Brown v. Board of Education. The case was actually a coordinated group of five lawsuits against school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Marshall led the legal team.
His core argument went straight at the “separate but equal” doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Segregated public schools, Marshall contended, were inherently unequal regardless of the physical facilities, because the act of separation itself inflicted psychological harm on Black children. To support that claim, his team presented research by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose doll experiments showed Black children in segregated schools overwhelmingly identifying white dolls as “nice” and Black dolls as “bad.”
On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed that “separate but equal” had no place in public education. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that legal separation of Black children gave them “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” The ruling dismantled the constitutional foundation of government-mandated school segregation.
From Advocate to Judge to Justice
President John F. Kennedy gave Marshall a recess appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961 and formally nominated him in January 1962. Southern senators who opposed his civil rights record stalled the nomination for months, but the Senate confirmed him on September 11, 1962. He served on the appellate court for nearly four years.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as United States Solicitor General, the federal government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court. He was the first African American to hold the position. During his tenure he argued nineteen cases on behalf of the United States and won fourteen.
On June 13, 1967, Johnson nominated Marshall to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The confirmation fight was contentious; southern senators who had spent careers resisting desegregation saw Marshall as the embodiment of everything they had lost. The Senate confirmed him on August 30, 1967, by a vote of 69 to 11.
His Record on the Supreme Court
Marshall served on the Court for twenty-four years. He believed the Constitution was a living document whose meaning had to evolve with society’s understanding of justice and equality, and he consistently voted to protect individual rights, expand access to due process, and limit government power when it threatened civil liberties.
His firmest position involved capital punishment. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), Marshall wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the death penalty was unconstitutional under any circumstances. The decision temporarily halted executions nationwide. When the Court reversed course in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) and reinstated the death penalty under revised state statutes, Marshall dissented, calling capital punishment “excessive,” serving “no valid legislative purpose,” and “in and of itself morally unacceptable to the people of the United States.” He continued to dissent in every death penalty case for the rest of his tenure.
As the Court’s majority grew more conservative, Marshall became known for dissents in cases that narrowed civil rights protections or restricted access to the courts for poor and minority communities. Those opinions did not carry the force of law, but they preserved arguments later lawyers and judges could draw on.
Retirement and Death
Marshall announced his retirement on June 27, 1991. In his letter to President George H.W. Bush, he wrote that “the strenuous demands of court work and its related duties required or expected of a justice appear at this time to be incompatible with my advancing age and medical condition.” At a press conference the next day, he put it plainly: “I’m old. I’m getting old and falling apart.” He was eighty-two. President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to fill the seat.
Marshall died on January 24, 1993, at the age of eighty-four, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His career traced the full arc of the legal battle for civil rights in America, from arguing his first desegregation case in a Baltimore courtroom to shaping constitutional law from the nation’s highest bench.