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| Good Fight: Lawyers Thurgood Marshall (right) and U. Simpson Tate check documents during a 1956 court hearing in Tyler, Texas,
where they were representing the NAACP. AP/File |
Thurgood Marshall: Civil Rights Champion
For kids: US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American to be appointed to the highest court in the land.
By Sonya Stinsonfrom the February 12, 2008 edition
Page 1 of 2
You'd probably groan if you had to memorize long portions of a complicated document as punishment for cutting up in class.
The young Thurgood Marshall wasn't too happy, either, when teasing his classmates and joking around got him sent to the school basement to learn huge chunks of the US Constitution.
But when Mr. Marshall grew up, he could laugh about the experience. By the time he left that school, he said, he knew the whole Constitution by heart.
It's a good thing he did, because he became a very influential person in US history – as a famous civil rights lawyer and later the first African-American justice on the US Supreme Court – and the Constitution was a major inspiration in his life and career.
Civil rights lawyers specialize in protecting the freedoms that the Constitution guarantees to American citizens. Civil rights law focuses especially on the rights provided by the 13th and 14th Amendments.
Mr. Marshall's most famous civil rights case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. (the "v." stands for "versus," the Latin word for "against"), was tried before the US Supreme Court.
It was actually a combination of five cases that originated in lawsuits by black students and their parents challenging legal segregation, or separation by race. In the 1950s, when these cases began, some states still had laws requiring black kids and white kids to attend separate schools.
Although these states claimed that their laws followed a doctrine known as "separate but equal," which the court had approved in an 1896 case, anyone could see that the education black children received was really not equal but second-rate. They often had to walk miles to get to ramshackle school buildings where the outdated books were falling apart, while white students generally rode comfortable buses to their well-equipped schools.
Mr. Marshall and the other attorneys representing the parents and students in the lawsuits wanted the Supreme Court to declare that the state segregation laws were unconstitutional.
They argued that the laws violated a clause in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requiring "equal protection of the laws."
They also tried to convince the court that forcing black children to attend segregated schools made them feel inferior and denied them the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Growing up in the early 20th century, Mr. Marshall knew firsthand how it felt to experience segregation and discrimination.
Born July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, he was named Thoroughgood after his paternal grandfather, but in second grade he shortened it to Thurgood because he thought it took too long to spell a name with so many letters.
Four years before Mr. Marshall was born, many black people in Baltimore held a boycott of local trains and steamships to protest new Maryland laws requiring segregation of "white" and "colored" passengers. (To boycott something means to refuse to use or buy it.)
The protesters didn't succeed in changing the law, but they did get a morale boost when big shipping lines took out ads apologizing to black patrons for having to enforce the law.
Mr. Marshall's father, William, was a dining-car waiter for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. His mother, Norma, was a schoolteacher. When he was 2 years old, Mr. Marshall, his parents, and his older brother, William Aubrey, moved to Harlem in New York City. They returned to Baltimore when Mr. Marshall was 6, and he was sent to the elementary school where his mother worked so she could keep an eye on him.
William Marshall had a big influence on his son's choice of a legal career. Speaking of his father, Thurgood Marshall once told a reporter: "He never told me to become a lawyer, but he turned me into one. He did it by teaching me to argue, by challenging my logic on every point, by making me prove every statement I made."
After high school, Mr. Marshall attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the nation's oldest black university. One day he went with some of his college friends to see a cowboy movie in a nearby town. They were forbidden to sit on the main floor of the movie theater and instead were told to move to the "colored" balcony.
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