J U S T I C E F O R A L L

THE LEGACY OF

Thurgood Marshall
1 Enlisting the Courts in the Civil Rights Fight 

 By Michael Jay Friedman

5 e Case of the Century

 By Michael Jay Friedman

9 Another First: Supreme Court Justice Marshall

 By Michael Jay Friedman

12 On the Front Lines With Marshall: An Interview With Jack Greenberg

15 Charles Hamilton Houston: A Visionary on Racial Equality

 By Mildred Solá Neely

17 A Bill of Rights for Kenya: Marshall’s Role

 By Mary L. Dudziak

19 urgood Marshall: A Timeline

21 urgood Marshall’s Legacy

23 Bibliography 

J U S T I C E F O R A L L

THE LEGACY OF

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall, 1967 Cover photo: Thurgood Marshall, on September 

11, 1962, after his Senate confirmation to the U.S. 

Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. 
1

Enlisting the Courts in 

the Civil Rights Fight

B Y M I C H A E L J A Y F R I E D M A N

The name of urgood Marshall may not 

be as well-known outside the United 

States as that of his fellow civil rights 

leader, Martin Luther King Jr. And yet, 

Marshall’s achievement in demolishing 

the legal structure that sustained racial segregation in 

the American South advanced the civil rights cause as 

profoundly as the nonviolent protests led by King. 

“No other American did more to lead our country 

out of the wilderness of segregation than urgood 

Marshall,” said his fellow Supreme Court Justice Lewis 

Powell. 

oroughgood (actual birth name) Marshall 

was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. 

His father was a railroad porter and his mother 

was an elementary schoolteacher. In second grade, 

young Marshall shortened his name to urgood. 

He graduated from Baltimore’s segregated Colored 

High School and then Lincoln University, “the first 

institution founded anywhere in the world to provide 

a higher education in the arts and sciences for youth 

of African descent.” Lincoln produced acclaimed 

figures such as Marshall’s classmate Langston 

Hughes, a major contributor to the literary “Harlem 

Renaissance”; Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of 

independent Ghana; and his Nigerian counterpart, 

Nnamdi Azikiwe.

Marshall quickly distinguished himself as a 

gifted storyteller and a skilled debater. ese were 

among the skills of the successful trial lawyer, and 

Marshall decided to pursue a career in the law. He 

aimed to enroll close to home, at the University 

of Maryland Law School. But, as a segregated 

school, Maryland would not admit a black student. 

Marshall did not apply, but it was a harsh lesson in 

the discrimination and resulting lack of opportunity 

that held back many African Americans. Maryland 

Law’s stance, ironically, opened the door to unexpected 

opportunity for Marshall.

He enrolled instead at a black institution, Howard 

University Law School, in Washington, D.C. His 

mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings 

to pay the tuition. Marshall excelled at his studies, 

graduating number one in his class in 1933. At 

Howard Law, Marshall encountered one of the major, 

if under-celebrated figures of U.S. history, Vice Dean 

Charles Hamilton Houston (see “Charles Hamilton 

Houston: A Visionary on Racial Equality”). 

It was Houston who devised the legal strategy 

that Marshall would employ in courtrooms — from 

the deep South to the Supreme Court of the United 

States — to dismantle the legal segregation that still 

disadvantaged African Americans. 

After the 1861–65 Civil War and the freeing 

of the slaves in the American South, the U.S. 

government approved the Fourteenth Amendment to 

the Constitution. e amendment prohibited a state 

from depriving “any person within its jurisdiction the 

equal protection of the laws.” But, a few years later, 

white Southerners resorted to segregation of the races, 

a practice often called “Jim Crow.” (is is a term 

derived from a song in an 1828 minstrel show where 

a white man first performed in “blackface.”) An 1896 

Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, upheld 

this practice, ruling that racially “separate but equal” 

facilities met the “equal protection” standard.
2 

Houston and Marshall determined to overturn 

the Plessy decision in the U.S. courts by demonstrating 

that, in the real world, separate was never equal.  eir 

strategy required the patient accumulation of facts that 

supported their point.  ey also realized that it would 

take time to get rid of Plessy.  ey would undermine 

legal segregation one case at a time.

In 1934, Houston began to work for the National 

Association for the Advancement of Colored 

People (NAACP), an interracial group founded in 

1909 to work for the abolition of segregation and 

discrimination. He traveled throughout the South 

to document the appalling state of black schools for 

the NAACP. Marshall, who had set up a private legal 

practice in Baltimore, often accompanied him on 

these trips.

In 1935, Marshall — and Houston as his adviser 

— won their fi rst victory over legal segregation, in the 

case Murray v. Pearson.  e triumph was especially 

sweet for Marshall, as the defendant was the very same 

University of Maryland Law School that Marshall 

once had hoped to attend. 

In Maryland state court, Maryland Law’s lawyers 

argued that the school met the “separate but equal” 

Charles Houston, Marshall’s mentor, argued cases in court during his 

years as dean of Howard University’s law school. 

This high-school 

photograph of 

Thurgood Marshall was 

taken around 1921-25. 
3

“White” (top) and “colored” (above) schools in Paxville, South Carolina (1935-1950), where, as in other 

states in the South, “white” schools often received two to three times more money per student than 

did schools for African Americans. 
4 

requirement by granting qualified black applicants 

scholarships to enroll at out-of-state law schools. 

In Murray v. Pearson, the state court in Maryland 

rejected this argument. While the court was not yet 

prepared to rule against separation in public schools, it 

did hold that the alternative opportunities Maryland 

afforded black law school applicants were not equal. 

Maryland Law was ordered to admit qualified 

African-American students.

After the Murray triumph, Marshall became an 

NAACP staff lawyer under Houston. In 1940, at the 

age of 32, he helped found and became the chief of the 

NAACP Legal Defense Fund, dedicated to providing 

legal assistance to poor African Americans. In that 

year, he won his first Supreme Court victory, a ruling 

that the 14th Amendment’s due process clause barred 

the use of coerced confessions.

During the two decades that followed Murray, 

Marshall, Houston, and the NAACP team of civil 

rights attorneys struck down one pillar after another of 

the segregationist order:

• In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), argued 

by Houston, the U.S. Supreme Court extended 

to the entire nation the rule that where a state 

maintains only one law school or other type of 

school, it may not limit admission by race.

• In Smith v. Allwright (1944), Marshall won a 

Supreme Court decision barring the “whites only” 

primary elections in which political parties chose 

their general election candidates. His biographer, 

Juan Williams, has described how Marshall 

considered the case his most important triumph: 

“e segregationists would [demand that (the 

candidates) support segregation to capture their 

party’s nomination], and by the time the black and 

Hispanics and ... even in some cases, the women, 

got to vote in the general election, they were just 

voting for one segregationist or the other; they 

didn’t have a choice.”

• In Morgan v. Virginia (1946), Marshall obtained 

a Supreme Court ruling barring segregation in 

interstate bus transportation. In a later case, Boynton 

v. Virginia (1960), Marshall persuaded the court 

to order desegregation of bus terminals and other 

facilities made available to interstate passengers. 

ese cases led to the “Freedom Ride” movement 

of the 1960s.

• In Patton v. Mississippi (1947), the Supreme Court 

accepted Marshall’s argument that juries from 

which African Americans had been systematically 

excluded could not convict African-American 

defendants.

• In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Marshall persuaded the 

Supreme Court to rule that state courts could not 

constitutionally prevent the sale of real property to 

blacks even if that property is covered by a racially 

restrictive covenant. ese covenants were a legal 

tactic commonly used to prevent homeowners from 

selling their properties to blacks, Jews, and other 

minorities.

In all, Marshall would prevail in a staggering 29 

of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His 

stunning record reflected the great legal talent that 

had congregated at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 

Marshall’s shrewdness in selecting cases that would 

advance the team’s long-term strategy of undermining 

segregation, and his own formidable legal skills. He 

was, United Press International later concluded:

... an outstanding tactician with exceptional 

attention to detail, a tenacious ability to focus on 

a goal — and a deep voice that often was termed 

the loudest in the room. He also possessed a charm 

so extraordinary that even the most intransigent 

Southern segregationist sheriff could not resist his 

stories and jokes.

Armed with this potent combination of likeability 

and skill, Marshall in 1946 persuaded an all-white 

Southern jury to acquit 25 blacks on a charge of 

rioting. On other occasions, he escaped only narrowly 

the beatings or worse that every assertive African 

American in the “Jim Crow” South risked. 

Even as urgood Marshall dismantled the 

lies and evasions that for so long justified racial 

segregation, he was stockpiling the experience and 

wisdom that would carry him to the landmark case, 

Brown vs. Board of Education, and beyond.

Michael Jay Friedman is a staff writer with the U.S. State 

Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs. 

He holds a doctorate in U.S. political and diplomatic history. 
5

Thanks to Marshall and the National 

Association for the Advancement 

of Colored People (NAACP) Legal 

Defense Fund, the federal courts had 

ruled that “separate but equal” schools 

really had to be equal.  at was a real achievement, 

but not the best tool to eff ect broad change. Poor 

African Americans in each of the hundreds of school 

districts in the South could hardly be expected to 

litigate the comparative merits of segregated black and 

white schools. 

Only a direct ruling against segregation itself 

could at one stroke eliminate disparities like those in 

Clarendon County, South Carolina, where per pupil 

expenditures in 1949–50 averaged $179 for white 

students and only $43 for blacks. Marshall and his 

team stepped in to get just such a ruling with the 

Brown case, and in the process changed the face of 

American society.

When it reached the Supreme Court, the litigation 

known as Brown v. Board of Education included fi ve 

consolidated lawsuits from four states, including 

South Carolina (from Clarendon County, see photos 

of Paxville, Clarendon County schools on page 3) 

and Kansas.  e Topeka, Kansas, case involved gradeschooler Linda Brown, who had been obliged to attend 

a black school 21 blocks from her house.  ere was a 

white school only seven blocks away. 

Signifi cantly, the trial court had denied the Kansas 

plaintiff (technically, the plaintiff was Linda Brown’s 

father, the Rev. Oliver Brown) relief by fi nding that 

the segregated black and white schools there were of 

comparable quality.  is gave Marshall the chance 

Moments after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, 

lawyers George E. C. Hayes, left; Thurgood Marshall, center; 

and James M. Nabrit, right, join hands before the U.S. 

Supreme Court in celebration of their victory.

B Y M I C H A E L J A Y F R I E D M A N

The Case of the Century
6

to urge that the Supreme Court at last rule that 

segregated facilities were, by defi nition and as a matter 

of law, unequal and hence unconstitutional.

Marshall’s legal strategy relied on social scientifi c 

evidence.  e NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled 

a team of experts spanning the fi elds of history, 

economics, political science, and psychology. Particularly 

signifi cant was a study in which the psychologists 

Kenneth and Mamie Clark sought to determine how 

segregation aff ected the self-esteem and mental wellbeing of African Americans. Among their poignant 

fi ndings: Black children aged three to seven preferred 

white rather than otherwise identical black dolls.

 e Supreme Court heard arguments on Brown 

on two separate occasions. At the second, December 8, 

1953, many people realized that history might be in the 

making. Lines for the 50 general public seats were long. 

 e fortunate heard Assistant U.S. Attorney General J. 

Lee Rankin off er the federal government’s endorsement 

of the plaintiff s’ argument. He asserted that the justices 

possessed the “power and duty” to rule that segregation 

violated the Constitution.  ose present also heard 

 urgood Marshall’s powerful summation:  e 

question, Marshall told the Court, was “whether or not 

the wishes of these [segregationist] states shall prevail 

or whether our Constitution shall prevail.”

Federal troops escort black students as they arrive at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the fi rst week 

of integration in September 1957. Marshall won the lawsuit that set the stage for the federal government to step in with 

troops to protect the black students from violent protestors and the Arkansas governor’s calling of the National Guard 

to foil integration.
Linda Brown Smith is shown 

in this 1952 photo, when she 

was nine years old. Smith’s 

father started a class-action 

suit that, together with 

four other suits, led to the 

landmark Brown v. Board of 

Education decision. 

Thurgood Marshall arrives 

at the U.S. District Court in 

Little Rock, Arkansas, on 

September 20, 1957. His legal 

skills succeeded in forcing 

Arkansas Governor Orval 

Faubus to withdraw the 

National Guard from Central 

High School and integrate the 

previously all-white school. 

7
8 

On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court 

vindicated Marshall’s strategy. Citing the Clark paper 

and other studies identifi ed by plaintiff s, the Supreme 

Court ruled decisively:

... in the fi eld of public education the doctrine 

of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate 

educational facilities are inherently unequal. 

Therefore, we hold that the plaintiff s and 

others similarly situated ... are, by reason of 

the segregation complained of, deprived of the 

equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 

Fourteenth Amendment.

Education attorney Deryl W. Wynn, a member 

of the Oxford University Roundtable on Education 

Policy, has said of the signifi cance of Brown,

Here was the highest court in the land essentially 

saying that something was wrong with how black 

Americans were being treated. ... I remember my 

father, who was a teenager at the time, saying the 

decision made him feel like he was somebody. 

... On a personal level, Brown’s real legacy is that 

it serves as a constant reminder that each child, 

each of us, is somebody.

 e Court did not specify a timeframe for ending 

school segregation, but the following year, in a group of 

cases known collectively as “Brown II,” Marshall and 

his colleagues secured a Supreme Court ruling that 

desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed.”

Even then, resistance continued in parts of the 

South. In September 1957, when black students were 

forcibly turned away from Central High School in 

Little Rock, Arkansas, Marshall fl ew to the city and 

fi led suit in federal court. Marshall’s victory in this 

case set the stage for President Dwight Eisenhower’s 

declaration of September 24: “I have today issued an 

Executive Order directing the use of troops under 

Federal authority to aid in the execution of Federal 

law at Little Rock, Arkansas. ... Mob rule cannot be 

allowed to override the decisions of our courts.” 

Ultimately, Marshall would obtain another 

Supreme Court decision, this one ordering the 

immediate desegregation of the Little Rock public 

schools.

In 1956, Marshall — using Brown as the key 

decision — came to the legal rescue of Martin 

Luther King Jr. and his followers in the Montgomery, 

Alabama, bus boycott.  e boycott began on December 

1, 1955, sparked by Rosa Parks’ brave refusal to 

relinquish her seat on a segregated municipal bus to a 

white man. It was Marshall and the NAACP’s legal 

team who argued for Montgomery’s blacks before the 

courts. A November 13, 1956, Supreme Court ruling 

held unconstitutional the policy of relegating blacks to 

the back of the bus.  e city of Montgomery yielded 

and the boycott succeeded at last. 

Although many dedicated professionals worked 

with him, no American contributed more than 

 urgood Marshall to the dismantling of legal 

segregation. Few could boast of a greater record of 

achievement, but Marshall’s career of public service 

had only begun. He would support the cause of civil 

rights for all at the highest federal level, as the fi rst 

African American appointed to the Supreme Court.

Baltimore kindergarten teacher Gwendolyn Michaels poses a 

question to her class on September 7, 1954. 
9

 A N O T H E R F I R S T

Supreme Court Justice 

Marshall

By 1961,  urgood Marshall had 

contributed as much as any American to 

the legal defeat of segregation.  anks 

to Marshall’s eff orts, activists like Dr. 

Martin Luther King Jr. would have the 

law — and the millions of Americans who respect 

the law — on their side. By setting the law fi rmly 

against public segregation, Marshall and his colleagues 

contributed to a climate in which laws like the Civil 

Rights Act of 1964 would outlaw many forms of 

private discrimination.

Unlike King and other African-American leaders, 

Marshall waged this struggle through the courts and 

then from within government. In another measure 

of the improving climate for blacks, President John 

F. Kennedy in 1961 appointed Marshall to the U.S. 

Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which serves 

the states of New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.  e 

Court of Appeals is the second highest level of federal 

court, and Marshall was only the second African 

American to serve as a federal appellate judge. 

Marshall wrote 98 opinions as a Circuit Court 

judge. Not a single one was ever overturned by the 

Supreme Court.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed 

Marshall, already the prevailing advocate in nearly 

30 Supreme Court decisions, as solicitor general of 

the United States.  is meant he was responsible 

for arguing the government’s positions before the 

Supreme Court.

Fittingly, his fi rst case as solicitor general was 

to present the federal case in the murder of the civil 

rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, 

and Michael Schwerner.  e three victims, who had 

been registering black voters, were killed in 1964 in 

Nashoba County, Mississippi, by racist conspirators. 

 e Mississippi state courts had refused to convict the 

murderers, but Marshall persuaded the Supreme Court 

to order a trial on federal civil rights charges. 

On June 13, 1967, President Johnson nominated 

Marshall to be the nation’s fi rst African-American 

B Y M I C H A E L J A Y F R I E D M A N

As Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall prepares to take his 

seat on the U.S. Supreme Court on October 2, 1967, his wife 

Cecilia helps him with his robes. 
President Lyndon B. Johnson, left, after announcing on June 13, 1967, that he was nominating Solicitor General 

Thurgood Marshall, right, to serve on the Supreme Court. 

10
11

Supreme Court justice. “I believe he has already earned 

his place in history,” the president said. “But I think it 

will be greatly enhanced by his service on the Court.”

Johnson was right. Despite opposition from 

some Southern senators, Marshall was confirmed and 

assumed his seat as an associate justice on October 2, 

1967. He quickly emerged as a reliable supporter of 

the rights of “organized labor, racial minorities, the 

advancement of women, the broadening of rights to 

freedom of expression, and the narrowing of police 

authority,” Harvard Law Professor Randall L. Kennedy 

has written. “No member of the Supreme Court has 

ever been more keenly alive to social inequalities.”

Justice Marshall was an unyielding opponent of 

capital punishment, and voted to overturn every death 

sentence that came before the Court. He proved as 

strong a champion of freedom of expression as he 

had been for civil rights. In 1972, Marshall sided with 

Earl Mosley, a postal employee who had picketed a 

public high school with a sign alleging racism at the 

school. When the city passed an ordinance prohibiting 

picketing within 50 meters of a school except for labor 

picketing, Mosley challenged the law. Marshall held 

that the city could not distinguish between those types 

of speech it would permit and those it would restrict. 

He wrote, 

Above all else, the First Amendment means that 

government has no power to restrict expression 

because of its message, its ideas, its subject 

matter, or its content. To permit the continued 

building of our politics and culture, and to assure 

self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are 

guaranteed the right to express any thought, free 

from government censorship.

Marshall served on the Supreme Court until 

1991. He died in 1993, at the age of 84. President Bill 

Clinton attended Marshall’s memorial service at the 

National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., which was 

televised nationwide. Chief Justice William Rehnquist 

said in his eulogy: 

Inscribed above the front entrance to the Supreme 

Court building are the words “Equal justice under 

law.” Surely no one individual did more to make 

these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall.

The Supreme Court justices in 1990: Standing, from left, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and 

David Souter. Seated, from left: Harry A. Blackmun, Byron R. White, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Thurgood Marshall, 

and John Paul Stevens.
12

O N T H E F R O N T L I N E S W I T H M A R S H A L L

An Interview With 

Jack Greenberg

J

ack Greenberg was a 27-year-old lawyer 

in 1954 when he worked with urgood 

Marshall on the Brown v. Board of Education

case, where the Supreme Court ruled that 

racial segregation was unconstitutional. In 

this interview, Greenberg shares his thoughts on the 

legacy of urgood Marshall. A professor of law at 

Columbia University in New York City, Greenberg 

is the author of several books, including Crusaders in 

the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement

(2004).

Alexandra Abboud, a staff writer with the 

U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International 

Information Programs, conducted the interview with 

Mr. Greenberg.

Question: What would you say was the historical 

and social significance of the 1954 Brown v. Board of 

Education decision? 

Mr. Greenberg: Brown was a school segregation case 

that said that the laws in place in the Southern part of 

the United States which prohibited blacks and whites 

from going to school together were unconstitutional. 

But more importantly, the Brown case was like an 

ice breaker going through the frozen sea of racism. 

It broke up the racist system that was essentially 

congealed into the American polity. We had Southern 

senators who were elected by whites only, and they 

kept becoming elected and reelected, and their power 

depended upon them excluding blacks from political 

participation. e Brown case broke all that up.

Question: What were some of urgood Marshall’s 

strengths as an attorney that helped win the Brown 

case? 

Mr. Greenberg: urgood Marshall was focused. He 

always believed in racial integration and wanted to 

strike down the segregation laws and practices within 

the United States. I would liken him to General 

George Marshall during the Second World War. He 

was the one who got all the troops together from all 

different areas, competencies, and abilities, and melded 

them into a focused unit. 

We worked with law professors and practitioners, 

social psychologists, and historians. He was like the 

orchestra conductor who brought everyone together 

and focused them into a single melody. 

Question: e Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 resulted 

in the “separate but equal doctrine,” which said that 

segregation of blacks and whites was legal as long 

as the separate facilities were of equal quality. In the 

Brown case, Marshall made the argument for the first 

time that “separate,” by definition, could not be equal. 

Could you explain how Marshall and his legal team 

decided that it was time to make the challenge 

with Brown?

Mr. Greenberg: In 1935, there was a Maryland state 

case involving the admission of a black student to the 

University of Maryland Law School that Marshall 

won. e student was admitted because there was no 

law school for blacks. at case never even went to 

the Supreme Court; it was won in the Maryland state 
Jack Greenberg, second from left, and NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, far right, argue a 1952 case in Florida. 

A 1954 photo shows 

the lawyers for the 

NAACP Legal Defense 

and Educational Fund. 

From left, Louis L. 

Redding, Robert L. 

Carter, Oliver W. Hill, 

Thurgood Marshall, 

and Spottswood W. 

Robinson III. 

13
14 

courts. In 1939 there was a case in Missouri which 

went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the University 

of Missouri was ordered to admit a black to the 

University of Missouri Law School because there was 

no comparable facility for blacks within the state of 

Missouri. 

en in 1950 there were two cases, one out of 

Texas and one from Oklahoma. As the Texas case 

proceeded, the state, seeing the handwriting on the 

wall, built a law school for blacks. It had two rooms, 

didn’t have a law library, didn’t have a law review, had 

no alumni, but the state argued that was equal, which 

was a ridiculous claim. And the Supreme Court ruled 

that there is a lot more than just books, bricks, and the 

mortar involved in evaluating education. ere are the 

intangibles of your relationships with other students 

and what you learn from them and the lifelong 

associations that you make while in school. 

In the other case, a black student was excluded 

from the University of Oklahoma Graduate School 

of Education. As the case went on, they didn’t build 

another school for him; instead they allowed him to sit 

in the back of the room just outside the door and look 

in. Ultimately he was admitted into the classroom and 

to a seat which was marked for “Negroes only.” And 

the Supreme Court said that (action) separated him 

from the others in a way that interfered with his ability 

to learn.

So the court was moving more and more towards 

recognizing the intangible aspects of education and 

saying that no matter what you did, you could not be 

equal so long as you were keeping people separate.

In the Brown case, the momentum of those earlier 

cases, or the implication of those cases, was made 

explicit; separate never could be equal.

Question: What is the historical legacy of the Legal 

Defense Fund at the NAACP? 

Mr. Greenberg: e work of the LDF showed 

that law could accomplish a great deal. It was the 

first public-interest law firm and it institutionalized 

public-interest law. It won decisions in the Supreme 

Court saying that the practice of public-interest law 

is a constitutional right and brought an end to racial 

segregation. Today, we have this great proliferation of 

public-interest law firms all over the country, which 

represent a wide variety of political and social issues. 

Question: You’re a professor at Columbia University 

Law School. Are there many students today interested 

in practicing civil rights law?

Mr. Greenberg: An enormous number of students 

are still interested in practicing public-interest law. 

When I first came to Columbia University, I started a 

public-interest law program that offers public-interest 

fellowships and internships during the summer. e 

program now enrolls hundreds of students. In fact, 

there’s so much interest in public-interest law, there’s 

not enough room to accommodate all who really want 

to be in it.
15

Charles Hamilton Houston,  urgood 

Marshall’s mentor and law school 

professor, was the brilliant thinker 

who crafted the strategy that ended 

legalized segregation in the United 

States.  e litigation campaign Houston launched to 

reverse the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling on “separate but 

equal” facilities paved the way for Marshall’s triumph 

in Brown v. Board of Education.

Houston fi rmly believed in the power of law to 

create social change.  rough the years following 

Plessy, African Americans were conscious that 

existing “separate but equal” schools — with shoddy 

facilities, frequent overcrowding, and fewer or no 

books and supplies — short-changed their children. 

Houston persuaded the National Association for 

the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 

that it could end discrimination in education if the 

organization’s court cases succeeded in making it too 

expensive to maintain segregation with “equality.” 

 e string of cases that Houston and then 

Marshall won as attorneys for the NAACP confi rmed 

Houston’s analysis. Nearly a century after the Civil 

War, Brown gave African Americans access to 

improved educational opportunities.  is includes 

the opportunity of attending the top colleges and 

universities in the United States, the ticket to a better 

life for many Americans, both black and white.

Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. 

He was only 19 when he graduated from Amherst 

College and went on to serve in World War I in a 

segregated U.S. Army unit. He studied law at Harvard 

University, becoming the fi rst African-American editor 

of its prestigious law review. Houston also earned a 

Ph.D. in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor of 

civil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain.

By 1924, Houston was back in Washington, 

working part time teaching at the law school of 

Howard University, a historically black institution. 

Howard hired him in 1929 to head the law school. 

In just six years, Houston radically improved the 

C H A R L E S H A M I LT O N H O U S T O N

A Visionary on Racial 

Equality

B Y M I L D R E D S O L Á N E E L Y

Charles Hamilton Houston in an undated photo.
16 

education of African-American law students, earned 

full accreditation for the school, and produced a group 

of lawyers trained in civil rights. In the book Black 

Profi les, George R. Metcalf said that Houston took 

the job to turn Howard into “a ‘West Point of Negro 

leadership. so that Negroes could gain equality by 

fi ghting segregation in the courts.”

While at Howard University’s law school, 

Marshall recalled that Houston “made it clear to all of 

us that when we were done, we were expected to go 

out and do something with our lives.”

In 1935, Houston became special counsel to the 

NAACP, and surrounded himself with a select group 

of young lawyers, mostly from Howard.  is team 

— which included Marshall — began winning court 

case after court case before the Supreme Court. 

 ese racial discrimination cases — on issues ranging 

from the death penalty to housing — were carefully 

chosen by Houston to erode the legal underpinnings 

of segregation. 

After undertaking one of the cases that became 

part of Brown, Houston’s failing health forced him 

to resign from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. 

 urgood Marshall was his successor.

Houston died on April 22, 1950, four years before 

his star pupil won in Brown vs. Board of Education. 

At his funeral, Houston’s colleague at Howard, 

William Hastie, said in a tear-fi lled eulogy: “He 

guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class 

citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey.”

Mildred Solá Neely is a staff editor and writer with the U.S. State 

Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs.

A young Thurgood Marshall, standing; Donald Gaines Murray, center; and Charles Houston, right, prepare a 

desegregation case against the University of Maryland in 1935. 
17

A B I L L O F R I G H T S F O R K E N YA

Marshall’s Role

B Y M A R Y L . D U D Z I A K

I

n January 1960, the leading U.S. civil 

rights lawyer,  urgood Marshall, 

traveled to Kenya to try his hand at legal 

change in a new context. Marshall was 

invited by Tom Mboya, a young Kenyan 

nationalist leader, to aid his countrymen in 

negotiations over a new constitution for Kenya, 

then a British colony. Marshall had achieved 

landmark legal change in the United States, 

with victories in cases like Brown v. Board of 

Education outlawing racial segregation in public 

schools. Law in Africa, however, was entirely 

new to him.

Marshall confronted a tense political 

environment. Kenya’s colonial government had 

responded to the Mau Mau resistance movement 

by imposing a State of Emergency, detaining 

leading nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta, and 

restricting political organizing. But change was 

coming. Seventeen African nations would achieve 

independence in 1960 alone, and in January of that 

year the British government hosted a conference 

in which, for the fi rst time, African Kenyans were 

parties to constitutional negotiations as a step toward 

independence.

Marshall and Mboya traveled to Kiambu, outside 

of Nairobi, to meet with nationalist leaders. Although 

they had received a permit required for the meeting, 

a colonial offi cer barred Marshall’s participation. His 

permission to attend had been revoked.  is incident 

helped Marshall appreciate the diffi culties Africans 

faced daily under colonial rule. He later told the press 

that “independence and freedom for Kenya was due 

now.” “ ese people have had it,” he wrote to his wife, 

“and they are not going to take any more.” 

Later that month, Marshall and a group of 

nationalist leaders left Kenya for London and 

the Lancaster House Conference on the Kenya 

Constitution. Four delegations were present.  ey 

represented African nationalists; an all-white party; 

Asian Indians, a minority group in Kenya; and a mixed 

race group. Marshall was the only person present who 

was not British or Kenyan. 

 e conferees reached a rough consensus on 

voting rights and African majority representation 

Prime Minister of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta, left, welcomes 

Thurgood Marshall as he arrives in Nairobi, July 11, 1965. 
18

in the legislature. is made the issue of protection 

for minority rights especially important. Nationalist 

leader Ronald Ngala told the conference that “the best 

form of safeguard for all races in Kenya was a Bill of 

Rights enforced by an independent judiciary.” He 

announced that Marshall, “an expert on minorities and 

civil rights, had been retained” by his group to draft a 

proposed Bill of Rights.

Marshall’s proposed Bill of Rights would not be 

a simple American transplant. Even as it seemed 

to embody pragmatic solutions for problems facing 

Kenya, it offered an idealized vision of rights that 

embraced some protections not included in American 

constitutional law. e preamble stressed that “all 

persons are equal before the law,” and forbade 

discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, 

and other factors. It proposed rights guaranteeing 

freedom of religion, speech, and press; the right not 

to be enslaved or deprived of liberty; and the right to 

vote. Social welfare rights, unfamiliar in the American 

context, were made explicit: rights to health, education, 

and welfare, and the right to work, including “just 

and favourable remuneration insuring ... an existence 

worthy of human dignity.” Marshall was not charting 

an entirely new path, however. He relied here on the 

recently enacted Nigerian and Malayan constitutions, 

which paralleled the Universal Declaration on 

Human Rights.

e language guaranteeing property rights 

proved the most controversial. Property was a matter 

of intense conflict in Kenya. e most valuable 

land had originally been tribal land, and now was 

exclusively owned by white settlers. e settlers 

believed that their property rights must be protected, 

but nationalists wanted land reform and resettlement. 

Marshall recommended that provisions of the Nigerian 

Constitution be adapted to conditions in Kenya. A 

“taking” of personal property by the government 

could only be for public purposes, and required just 

compensation. A modification added a right of appeal 

directly to the highest court in Kenya. e intent was 

to protect minority settlers from government abuse. 

An argument broke out in committee: What 

“public purposes” could the government take land 

for? Some white settlers wanted this spelled out 

very clearly. But to do that would require the 

Africans to develop a policy on land reform on the 

spot — something they were not in a position to 

do. Differences over this issue were too deep to be 

resolved at Lancaster House, and the meeting ended 

with the matter left open. Colonial Secretary Ian 

Mcleod singled out Marshall’s Bill of Rights as a 

helpful contribution. Later, a land buy-out scheme 

with World Bank support relieved the pressure to 

resolve the property rights issue, allowing subsequent 

constitutional talks to focus on other matters. e 

final Bill of Rights in the 1963 Kenya Independence 

Constitution elaborated on many of the rights that 

urgood Marshall had crafted, including property 

rights, but did not include all the broad social welfare 

rights he had envisioned. 

Tom Mboya reflected on Marshall’s involvement 

in a 1960 letter: “I do not know whether it will ever be 

enough to write letters to thank you for your good work 

at the London Conference. ... I am sure I speak the 

mind of all of us, that you were the easiest man to work 

with, and that any of us who had apprehension before 

you came were easily disarmed as soon as we met you.” 

Mboya wrote, “As you yourself said, you were glad to 

come home, we were glad to receive you home.” 

In 1963, Marshall returned as the guest of now 

Prime Minister Kenyatta at Kenya’s independence 

ceremonies. Even as his career took Marshall to 

important federal appointments, including ultimately 

the U.S. Supreme Court, he never forgot about Kenya. 

He was proud to have been there at the beginning, 

helping to craft constitutional principles from the 

outset. And from Kenya came some of his most 

cherished stories, shared with his colleagues, his family, 

and his friends, to the end of his days.

Mary Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor 

of Law, History, and Political Science at the University of 

Southern California Law School and the author of Cold War 

Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

(Princeton University Press, 2000). Her research focuses on 

international approaches to legal history.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect 

the views or policies of the U.S. government.
T H U R G O O D M A R S H A L L : 

A Timeline

July 2, 1908: Born in Baltimore, Maryland. Later 

attends Samuel Coleridge Taylor Elementary 

School and Booker T. Washington Junior High.

1921-1925: Attends Colored High and Training 

School, which became Frederick Douglass High 

School in 1923.

1929: Marries Vivian Burey.

1930: Graduates cum laude from Lincoln 

University, in Lincoln, Pa.

1933: Graduates first in his class from Howard 

University Law School.

1934: Begins to work for Baltimore branch of the 

National Association for the Advancement of 

Colored People (NAACP).

1935: With mentor and friend Charles Hamilton 

Houston, wins first major civil rights case, Murray 

v. Pearson, desegregating the University of 

Maryland Law School. is was the law school 

Marshall could not attend on the grounds of race.

1936: Becomes assistant special counsel for 

NAACP in New York.

1940-1961: Serves as legal director of the NAACP. 

In 1940, he wins the first of his Supreme Court 

victories, Chambers v. Florida. Marshall won 29 

cases out of 32 he argued.

1950: Wins Supreme Court victories in two 

graduate school integration cases, Sweatt v. Painter

and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents.

1951: Visits South Korea and Japan to investigate 

charges of racism in the U.S. armed forces. He 

reported that the general practice was one of “rigid 

segregation.”

1954: Wins Brown v. Board of Education case, the 

landmark lawsuit that ends the legal segregation of 

schools in America.

Feb. 1955: Vivian Marshall dies.

Dec. 1955: Marries Cecilia A. Suyat; their union 

produces Marshall’s two sons, urgood Jr. and 

John William.

1961: Nominated and appointed to the U.S. Court 

of Appeals, 2nd Circuit. Makes 112 rulings, all of 

them later upheld by the Supreme Court.

1965: Appointed U.S. Solicitor General by 

President Lyndon Johnson; wins 14 of the 19 cases 

he argues for the government, 1965-1967.

1967: Becomes first African American appointed 

to the U.S. Supreme Court, 1967 to 1991.

1991: Retires from the Supreme Court.

1993: Dies at 84 in Bethesda, Maryland.

19
Thurgood Marshall’s widow, Cecilia, unveils a 

commemorative postage stamp honoring her 

husband, on July 29, 2002. 

20
21

Thurgood Marshall’s 

Legacy

Thurgood Marshall’s vast achievements, 

his commitment to equality for all men 

and women, and the example of courage 

and dedication he set for generations 

to come are honored and remembered 

throughout the United States. ese are just some of 

the institutions and awards in his honor.

Scholarship Funds and Awards

urgood Marshall Award

http://www.abanet.org/irr/marshall-award.html

urgood Marshall Legal Educational Opportunity 

Program 

http://www.ed.gov/programs/legal/index.html

urgood Marshall Scholarship Fund

http://www.thurgoodmarshallfund.org/index.htm

Institutions

urgood Marshall College, San Diego, CA 

http://provost.ucsd.edu/marshall/

e University of California, San Diego, named one of 

its colleges after urgood Marshall. 

University of Maryland School of Law, 

urgood Marshall Law Library 

http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/

e University of Maryland School of Law, which 

Marshall fought to desegregate, renamed and 

dedicated its law library in his honor. 

Texas Southern University, 

urgood Marshall School of Law, Houston, TX

http://www.tsu.edu/academics/law/index.asp

urgood Marshall Middle School, San Diego, CA

http://marshallmiddle.org/

urgood Marshall High School, Baltimore, MD 

http://www.bcps.k12.md.us/School_Info/Index.asp?sc

hoolNum=424&imageField.x=9&imageField.y=8

urgood Marshall Academy, Washington, DC 

http://www.thurgoodmarshallacademy.org/

urgood Marshall Elementary School, 

Gaithersburg, MD 

http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/

thurgoodmarshalles/

urgood Marshall Learning Center, 

Rock Island, IL 

http://homepage.risd41.org/tmlc/

Buildings

e Baltimore/Washington International urgood 

Marshall Airport

http://www.bwiairport.com/about_bwi/thurgood_

marshall/
22 

 e  urgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in 

Washington, DC

http://www. c.gov/public/home.nsf/

autoframe?openform&url_l=/public/home.nsf/

inavgeneral?openpage&url_r=/public/home.nsf/pages/

104

 urgood Marshall Memorial in Annapolis, MD 

http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/stagser/

s1259/121/6259/html/0001.html

A statue of  urgood Marshall in downtown 

Baltimore outside the Federal Building and U.S. 

Courthouse. 

http://www.baltimoremd.com/monuments/

thurgood.html

Think Tanks, Law Reviews

 urgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage

http://www.thurgoodmarshallcenter.org/

 urgood Marshall Law Society, Inc. of Rhode Island

http://www.tmls.org

 urgood Marshall Law Review 

http://www.tsu.edu/academics/law/academic/

review.asp

The U.S. Department of State assumes no responsibility for the 

content and availability of the resources from other agencies 

and organizations listed above. All Internet links were active as 

of January 2007.

Justice Thurgood 

Marshall poses with 

his family outside the 

Supreme Court Building 

in Washington, D.C., 

on September 1, 1967, 

after his swearing in as 

associate justice. 
23

Bibliography

BOOKS

Aldred, Lisa. urgood Marshall : Supreme Court Justice. 

Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, c2005.

Ball, Howard. A Defiant Life: urgood Marshall and 

the Persistence of Racism in America. New York: Crown 

Publishers, 1998.

Bland, Randall Walton. Private Pressure on Public 

Law: e Legal Career of Justice urgood Marshall. Port 

Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973. 

Bland, Randall Walton. Justice urgood Marshall, 

Crusader for Liberalism: His Judicial Biography. 

Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, ©2001. 

Davis, Michael D., and Hunter R. Clark. urgood 

Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench. 

Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub. Group, 1994.

Fenderson, Lewis H. urgood Marshall: Fighter for 

Justice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. 

Goldman, Roger L. with David Gallen. urgood 

Marshall: Justice for All. New York: Carroll & Graf, 

1992.

Greenberg. Jack. Crusaders in the Courts: How a 

Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights 

Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 

Marshall, urgood. Supreme Justice: Speeches and 

Writings. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania 

Press, 2003.

Rowan, Carl omas. Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: 

e World of Justice urgood Marshall. Boston: Little 

Brown & Co., 1993.

Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: urgood 

Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961. New York: 

Oxford University Press, 1994.

Tushnet, Mark V. Making Constitutional Law: 

urgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991. 

New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Tushnet, Mark V. urgood Marshall: His Speeches, 

Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences. 

Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001.

Williams, Juan. urgood Marshall: American 

Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998.

ARTICLES

Baine, Kevin T. “Wit, Wisdom, and Compassion of 

Justice urgood Marshall,” Hastings Constitutional 

Law Quarterly, Vol. 20 (Spring 1993), pp. 497-502. 

Barker, Lucius J. “urgood Marshall, the Law, and the 

System: Tenets of an Enduring Legacy,” Stanford Law 

Review, Vol. 44 (Summer 1992), pp. 1237-1247.
24

Bloch, Susan Low. “urgood Marshall: Courageous 

Advocate, Compassionate Judge,” Georgetown Law 

Review, Vol. 80 (1993), pp. 2003-2009. 

O’Connor, Sandra Day. “urgood Marshall: e 

Influence of a Raconteur.” Stanford Law Review,

Vol. 44 (Summer, 1992), pp. 1217-1220.

Williams, Juan. “Marshall’s Law: e Triumph of 

urgood Marshall,” Washington Post Magazine

( Jan. 7, 1990), p. SM12-29. 

WEB SITES

urgood Marshall Before the Courts 

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/

marshall/

Transcript of a hour-long radio documentary about 

the life of urgood Marshall, with interviews by 

his contemporaries. e Web site also contains 

biographical information, materials from the landmark 

Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation 

lawsuit, and the civil rights struggle.

urgood Marshall: American Revolutionary 

http://www.thurgoodmarshall.com/home.htm

Companion Web site to Juan Williams’ biography 

of urgood Marshall. Includes sections from the 

biography, Justice Marshall’s famous speeches and 

articles, and segments from interviews with Justice 

Marshall. 

urgood Marshall Biography and Timeline 

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/hill/marshall.htm

urgood Marshall Photo Gallery 

http://www.thurgoodmarshall.com/gallery/gallery.htm

Oral History of urgood Marshall From the 

Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library Collection 

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/

oralhistory.hom/MarshallT/marshall.pdf

urgood Marshall recounts his observations and 

meetings with President Johnson in this full-text oral 

history.

Marshall’s Appointment to the Supreme Court 

http://members.aol.com/klove01/marshall.htm

Contains the video of Marshall’s appointment to the 

Supreme Court.

urgood Marshall Bibliography

http://www.founders.howard.edu/moorland-spingarn/

MARSHALL.HTM

Written after Justice Marshall’s death in 1993, this 

comprehensive bibliography contains books, book 

reviews, dissertation, and magazine and newspaper 

articles by and about Marshall.

urgood Marshall: A Register of His Papers in the 

Library of Congress 

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/

eadpdfmss/2001/ms001047.pdf

A description of the archival materials from Marshall 

files housed at the Library of Congress.

Historical FBI Records on urgood Marshall

http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/marshall.htm

ousands of pages of documents from the FBI files 

documenting threats to Marshall’s life, interviews 

about his fitness to be a federal judge, and his noninvolvement in the Communist Party.

The U.S. Department of State assumes no responsibility for the 

content and availability of the resources from other agencies 

and organizations listed above. All Internet links were active as 

of January 2007.
Credits from left to right are separated by semicolons; 

from top to bottom by dashes.

Cover: © AP Images. Inside cover: LBJ Library photo by 

Yoichi R. Okamoto. Page 2: Scurlock Studio Records, 

Archive Center, National Museum of American History, 

Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution; Collection of 

the Supreme Court of the United States. 3: 

Courtesy of South Carolina Department of Archives 

and History (2). 5: © AP Images. 6: © AP Images. 7: 

© AP Images (2). 8: Photo taken by Baltimore Sun 

photographer. 9: Collection of the Supreme Court of the 

United States. 10: © AP Images. 11: © AP Images/Bob 

Daugherty. 13: © Bettman/CORBIS — © AP Images/

Courtesy of the NAACP. 15: Scurlock Studio Records, 

Archive Center, National Museum of American History, 

Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution. 16: Library of 

Congress. 17: © AP Images. 20: © AP Images/U.S. Postal 

Service, George Nikitin. 22: © AP Images. Back cover: 

© AP Images/Matt Houston.

Executive Editor: George Clack

Managing Editor: Mildred Solá Neely

Art Director/Design: Min-Chih Yao

Contributing Editor: Chandley McDonald

Photo Research: Ann Monroe Jacobs

CREDITS:

U. S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Bureau of International Information Programs

2007

http://usinfo.state.gov/
Left, Cecilia Marshall, widow of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice urgood Marshall, before the 

newly unveiled bust of her late husband. e unveiling was part of a ceremony dedicating the re-named 

Baltimore-Washington International urgood Marshall Airport on June 6, 2006. 

U. S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Bureau of International Information Programs

http://usinfo.state.gov/