THURGOOD MARSHALL - BRINGING DOWN INJUSTICE FROM WITHIN

​As I’ve said we’re going to be profiling one prominent African American each week of Black History month, some more well know, but maybe details you don’t know, others most of us haven’t heard of.  This is one of those well known ones, but you may not know the whole story.  

Thurgood Marshall served from 1967 to 1991 as an Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court. And he was one of my favorites as a student.  But it wasn’t so much for what he did on the court, it was what he did as an attorney that makes him my hero.  

Every civil rights movement needs three types of people or groups in my experience.  First there is the by any means necessary fighter(s) who are not afraid to live life outside the bounds of an unjust system.  This isn’t my favorite category, but I will admit I can’t think of an effort that has succeeded without these folks.  Women who voted illegally before women had the right to vote, protestors that shut down major events to fight for funding for the treatment and hopefully cure of AIDS, Malcom X, just to name a few.  

Then there are the ones who dance on the edge.  They are mostly working inside the bounds of the system, using confrontation but also trying to persuade and use dialogue.  In the African American Civil Rights Movement the first, but even close to only, name people cite is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

And the last group is the ones lawyers like, because we are supposed to live inside the bounds of unjurst systems and fix them from within through legal battles.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ACLU on women’s rights is a prime example, also the legal team that helped Him Obergefell and his deceased husband John and others create marriage equality for the LGBTQ community.  

But the master architect of that approach was Thurgood Marshall.  He was born Thoroughgood Marshall on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, his father held various jobs as a waiter in hotels, in clubs, and on railroad cars, and his mother was an elementary school teacher.  He attend Lincoln University for his undergraduate degree and Howard University for his law degree where he finished first in his class.  He passed the Maryland bar exam on his first try, and started a law practice in Baltimore.  

His first major desegregation victory came in private practice.  While trying to maintain a for profit law practice, he also did voluntary legal work for the local branch of the NAACP.  In 1935, Marshall brought suit against the University of Maryland on behalf of Donald Gaines Murray, an African American whose application to the university's law school had been rejected on account of his race.  Marhsall went to Howard for the same reason.  He won, in the Maryland state court system.  

Unable to make a for profit legal practice a reality, in part because of all of his free legal work, he soon decided to joint the NAACP legal team and eventually became director-counsel of the newly formed NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Their approach to ending segregation was to pick selected fights in various state and federal courts, and slowly build up a body of lower court cases and then use those plus the use of sociological data to show that segregation was inherently unequal. And a series of landmark Supreme Court Cases that gutted that injustice from within.  Of the thirty-two civil rights cases that Marshall argued before the Supreme Court, he won twenty-nine.  This during a time when the country’s will was very much continuing this oppression. His most famous victory of that string was Brown vs. Board of Education.  In a little side note, as the grandson and nephew of UAW members, I can say I’m proud to say that the United Auto Workers provided the major funding for Marshall and the NAACP’s legal team. The decision was a unanimous one in Brown.  And let me tell you that is rarity.  

This model is pretty much what Ruth Bader Ginsburg used with the ACLU on women’s rights.  Taking on the case of a man, being denied a tax deduction because of his gender, then using the victory and lessons learned to step by step tear down that discrimination brick by brick.  

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  Giving up a lifetime appointment, four years later, Johnson appointed him as the U.S. Solicitor General. The Solicitor General is the US Government’s lead attorney on cases before the US Supreme Court.  After two years, in 1967, Johnson nominated Marshall to replace Justice Tom C. Clark on the Supreme Court.  Initially it was feared that due to all of these battles, he would have alienated too many Senators to be confirmed.  But he was by an 86% vote.

I could go on for pages on his opinions as a justice, and he was a great one.  But for me, it’s the going into the heart of an oppressive system, despite being one of the oppressed, and brining it down brick by brick.  I will likely retire never arguing a series of cases of such importance.  But I can tell you, he does inspire me daily to stand up for my clients, in a system where super majority control by a party opposed to my clients’ rights.