Friday, February 13, 2009

Thurgood Marshall



There are those who say that Thurgood Marshall was America's leading radical and I think he may have liked that title.
As a justice on the US Supreme Court, he led a civil rights revolution from the 1960s to the 1990s, Marshall is less well-known today than Martin Luther King Jr--who preached for a non-violent end to racism--and Malcolm X--who chose a more violent route to fight discrimination. Thurgood Marshall, worked with, and through, the court system to end the legacy of slavery and destroy the last fragment of the Jim Crow laws; Marshall had a profound and lasting effect on race relations.

Although Thurgood--born Thoroughgood--Marshall on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, was the great-grandson of a slave, he graduated valedictorian from Howard University Law School in 1933, and soon began to represent civil-rights activists, becoming counsel for the NAACP in 1938. Over the next 23 years he won 29 of the 32 major cases he undertook for that organization, several of which set constitutional precedents in matters such as voting rights and breaking down segregated transportation and education.

President Kennedy named him to the US Court of Appeals, a seat he finally took despite the resistance of Southern senators, and where he served from 1962 to 1965. President Johnson appointed him US solicitor general, and then to the US Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American to hold such an office, sitting on the court from 1967 until 1991, and consistently voting with the liberal block.

Marshall ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the 'Separate-but-Equal' status quo of white America. Thurgood Marshall won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools. That decision ignited the 1960s civil rights movement, saw in increase in the numbers of black high school and college graduates, and gave rise to a black middle-class.

As the nation's first African-American Supreme Court justice, Marshall promoted affirmative action as a remedy for the nation's history of slavery and racial bias. Marshall made it clear that, while legal discrimination was over, much work needed to be done to see to it that chasm between what it meant to be white in America, and what it was to be black in America, would no longer be such an issue.
And though he worked on behalf of black Americans, Marshall also created new protections under law for women, children, prisoners, and the homeless. For Thurgood Marshall, true equality wouldn't come only from the great orators, nor would it rise up from the violence others proposed; only integration, true integration, would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once this was the norm in America, then blacks and whites, men, women, gay, straight, could rise or fall based on their own ability.

Thurgood Marshall died in 1993.

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