by Jeremy Leaming
There really are very few Supreme Court justices worth celebrating and many more who are easily forgettable.
But Thurgood Marshall, who joined the high court 45 years ago today, was a champion of equality before he became the first African American to join, at that time, the all-male, all-white Supreme Court.
Marshall was named to the federal appeals court by President John F. Kennedy, and later to the Supreme Court by Lyndon B. Johnson. Both were historic appointments. As John Schachter notes in this post, much of Marshall’s life included historic achievements.
After being denied admissions to the University of Maryland’s law school, because of racism, Marshall earned a law degree from Howard University and launched what would be a trailblazing legal career bolstering and advancing equality and liberty in the country.
In 1940 he founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has become one of the nation’s leading civil liberties groups. Before reaching the federal bench, Marshall, as a highly successful attorney, took to the courts and started toppling Jim Crow era laws, tawdry efforts to continue the oppression of African Americans. As Juan Williams wrote in Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, it was Marshall “who ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking down the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the ‘Separate-but-equal’ apartheid of American life in the first half of the century.”
Of course Marshall’s greatest victory before the high court came in Brown v. Board of Education, where he argued that the odious separate-but-equal principle aimed to keep African Americans “as near [slavery] as possible,” violated the Constitution.