Thurgood Marshall: Dissent in Florida v. Bostick

About the Author

Thurgood Marshall, whose grandfathers were both born slaves but became freemen, was the first African American U.S. Supreme Court justice. He was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, and his life spanned years during which segregation existed both in law and in practice. His formative experiences in Baltimore played an important role in his strong belief as an adult in the importance of the rule of law and the possibilities the U.S. Constitution held in advancing integration and protecting the rights of racial minorities. He did as much as perhaps any single American to create today's postsegregation society.

In 1925 Marshall enrolled at the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. After graduation, he hoped to attend the University of Maryland law school but was denied admission because of his race, so he enrolled in law school at Howard University, where he came under the tutelage of its highly regarded dean, Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston trained his law students in the art of legal argumentation and litigation strategy, focusing on defending the civil rights of African Americans. After graduating from Howard in 1933, Marshall moved to New York City, which was then a dynamic mecca of African American culture and politics. There he was exposed to diverse viewpoints and backgrounds and served first as a staff attorney and then as the legal director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). By 1940 Marshall had risen to become the NAACP's chief counsel.

Marshall, an ardent integrationist, was a key architect of the legal strategy behind modern American civil rights. During his years at the NAACP, he litigated dozens of important legal challenges to segregation, building a base of experience as well as court rulings that would eventually lead to the end of legal segregation. It was Marshall's life goal to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation of public railroad cars was legal because, presumably, the cars occupied for blacks were “equal” to those reserved for white travelers. He worked closely with Houston in creating the legal strategy that dismantled the Plessy doctrine. A half century after Plessy, the Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), holding that segregated public schools violated the U.S. Constitution. Marshall built the legal strategy behind Brown and, in a watershed moment in American history, successfully argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the post-Brown years found the civil rights movement battling de facto segregation in the schools (that is, segregation that existed “in fact” rather than by law), Marshall continued to lend a guiding hand first as a justice on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and later as a Supreme Court justice.

In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although his confirmation hearing was at times contentious, with conservative southern senators attempting to portray Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, his confirmation was secured with some intervention on the part of Johnson, a gifted parliamentarian and backroom dealer. As a member of the highest appeals court in the United States, he would be reviewing cases that would become the legal progeny of holdings he had played a role in as an advocate. At the same time, Marshall's tenure on the Supreme Court, which lasted until 1991, coincided with a powerful backlash against some of the legal gains made during the civil rights movement, which served to create a complex jurisprudence on race. Marshall died on January 24, 1993, in Washington, D.C.