Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore Maryland.His parents were not poor but were by no means rich. They were able to make enough money to live in a nice neighborhood and tried to shield him from the racism around them. As a child, he would go to local courts with his father and brothers to watch the cases. His father would always ask him if he would find the subtleties and points during the case, which lead to his love for law. Additionally, he was a somewhat mischievous child and would often get sent out of the classroom for misbehaving in school. The teachers would make him read the constitution as punishment, and as a result, when he graduated, Marshall was extremely familiar with the constitution.
Marshall was extremely intelligent and was accepted to Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania where he was good friends with the writer Langston Hughes, and eventually graduated in 1930. At Lincoln, he joined many debate clubs which further culminated his passion for being a lawyer. Eventually, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School but was denied because of his skin color. So he went to Howard University; his mother had to sell her wedding ring to pay for the education. At Howard, he learned about how the constitution was a living document, which was a more judicial activism viewpoint. His mentors here introduced him to the NAACP, and after he graduated from Howard, he started volunteering with the NAACP. With this organization, Marshall argued in numerous cases across the US, many of them being in the south investigating lynchings, voting rights and fair trials to blacks.
In 1952, Marshall got the case he had always hoped for, and finally arguing for 5 months, the Supreme Court concluded that separate but equal was not constitutional, the very essence of Brown v. Board of Education. This was obviously a major win for the NAACP and all African Americans at the time. And in 1967, he was appointed to the US Supreme Court by Lyndon B Johnson and became the first African American to be an associate justice on the Supreme Court. On this court, he held a very liberal and activists voice, always advocating for desegregation, especially in schools.
He later retired in 1991 and would be succeeded by Justice Clarence Thomas. On January 24, 1993, he sadly died of heart failure in Bethesda Maryland.
Sources:
https://www.biography.com/activist/thurgood-marshall
https://www.oyez.org/justices/thurgood_marshall
It was really funny that he misbehaved enough to become well versed in the Constitution. It was also really interesting that his father kind of pushed him towards law by taking him to court to watch the proceedings and having him look for the subtleties in the cases.
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting that he was friends with people Like Hughes also how he culminated enough knowledge to go to law school.
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