Path to the Supreme Court
The University of Maryland's law school would not have him, and within three years of finishing law school somewhere else he made it take a Black student anyway. Whether Thurgood Marshall ever formally applied to Maryland is one of the few disputed facts of a well-documented life: his own recollection, in the oral history he gave in 1977, was that 'Of course, I couldn't go to the University of Maryland because they wouldn't take Negroes,' and his biographers mostly conclude he never bothered to ask; one claimed a rejection letter no one has produced. What is not disputed is the sequel. In 1935, with his teacher Charles Hamilton Houston beside him, Marshall sued the school on behalf of Donald Murray, argued that the state had provided no comparable law school for Black Marylanders, and won; on January 15, 1936, Maryland's Court of Appeals affirmed the order admitting him. The lawyer was twenty-seven. Everything that followed, from the thirty-two arguments at the Supreme Court to the twenty-four years on it, ran on the same principle: the law that excluded him could be made to include everyone.
He was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908, as Thoroughgood, a name shortened in his schooldays. His father, William, was a railroad porter and later a steward at a segregated Chesapeake Bay club; his mother, Norma, taught elementary school. Lincoln University in Pennsylvania took him in 1925 and gave him the debate team, a fraternity, and, in September 1929, a wife, Vivian Burey, whom everyone called Buster. Howard Law School gave him Houston, the vice-dean who ran the place and told every student that 'a lawyer's either a social engineer or he's a parasite on society,' and Marshall finished first in the class of 1933 as a social engineer.
By 1936 he was on the NAACP's legal staff and by 1940 he was director-counsel of its new Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the office he held for twenty-one years. The record he built there is the most consequential any American lawyer has compiled: by the tally Congress later adopted, thirty-two cases argued before the Supreme Court, beginning with Chambers v. Florida in 1940, and twenty-nine of them won, among them Smith v. Allwright against the white primary, Morgan v. Virginia against segregated interstate buses, Shelley v. Kraemer against racial covenants, and Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin against segregated graduate schools. The work was done in the South, in courtrooms that did not want him and on roads that were dangerous after dark. In November 1946, leaving Columbia, Tennessee, after winning acquittals in the riot trials there, he was pulled over, arrested on an invented drunk-driving charge, and driven toward the river, an episode the fullest modern account describes as a near-lynching interrupted by a colleague who followed the police car with his headlights on. His FBI file, opened decades later, showed a man who criticized the Bureau's lynching investigations in the forties, quietly cooperated with it against communist infiltration in the fifties, and turned on its wiretapping in the sixties.
Then came the case. At the reargument of Brown v. Board of Education in December 1953 he told the Court that 'the only way that this Court can decide this case in opposition to our position' was to find a reason for the classification, and that 'the only way to arrive at that decision is to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.' On May 17, 1954, the Court declined to find it. Buster died in February 1955; in December he married Cecilia Suyat, and they had two sons.
President Kennedy put him on the Second Circuit by recess appointment on October 5, 1961, and the Senate, its Judiciary Committee chaired by a Mississippian, took until September 11, 1962, to confirm him. He wrote, by the count Congress later recorded, 112 opinions there, none reversed. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson made him Solicitor General, the first Black lawyer to hold the office, and on June 13, 1967, when Tom C. Clark (§86) left the Court, Johnson named him to it with a sentence built for the occasion: 'I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.' The hearings were an ordeal of a familiar kind. Strom Thurmond quizzed him on some sixty points of Reconstruction-era constitutional trivia, the membership of the committee that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment among them, and the nominee let the questions answer themselves. The Senate confirmed him 69 to 11 on August 30, 1967, and he took his seat on October 2, the first Black justice in the Court's history.
On the Supreme Court
Among the most repeated sentences in the modern reports is his and William Brennan's (§90): 'Adhering to our views that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,' it runs, citing their Gregg dissents, 'we would grant certiorari and vacate the death sentences in these cases.' They filed it, or its twin, against every capital case the Court declined to hear for the rest of their shared tenure, and the Supreme Court Database gives the partnership a number: across 2,213 divided cases, the two men landed on the same side 88.1 percent of the time, the highest agreement of any pair in the site's matrices, a hair ahead of Brennan's own with Earl Warren. When Marshall spoke for the Court his sentences were as plain as his arguments had been. In Stanley v. Georgia (1969) he struck a conviction for possessing obscene films at home: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.' In Police Department of Chicago v. Mosley (1972) he wrote the sentence that content-neutrality doctrine still begins from: '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.'
But the Court he joined in 1967 was not the Court he served on for most of the next quarter century, and the dissents are where the chapter of his judging is written. In San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), when the Court upheld school financing by local property wealth, he called the holding 'a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity.' In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), when it stopped the Detroit remedy at the city line, he wrote that 'unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.' In Bakke (1978) he refused the equal-protection symmetry his colleagues found: 'The dream of America as the great melting pot has not been realized for the Negro; because of his skin color he never even made it into the pot.' In Furman (1972) his concurrence had grounded the death penalty's unconstitutionality in what an informed citizen would think of it, that a person who knew 'all the facts presently available regarding capital punishment' would 'find it shocking to his conscience and sense of justice'; Gregg reinstated the penalty four years later, and the sentence above became his answer to every capital case thereafter. In Richmond v. Croson (1989) the Court's new majority took what he called 'a deliberate and giant step backward.' And in Payne v. Tennessee, in the last week of June 1991, he filed the last dissent of his career, and opened it with the line that serves as his verdict on the Court he was leaving: 'Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court's decisionmaking.'
He declined to celebrate the Constitution's bicentennial in 1987, in a speech given that May to a gathering of lawyers. 'I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever "fixed" at the Philadelphia Convention,' he told them; the government the framers devised 'was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.' It was the argument of Murray v. Pearson at the scale of the whole document.
The Supreme Court Database sets his career at the edge of the modern bench. Across 3,537 coded votes his liberal share was 72.0 percent against a docket baseline of 48.4: a gap of 23.5 points, the widest of any of the thirty-three justices of the modern era in either direction. His dissent rate of 28.0 percent, against colleagues who dissented at 17.9 on the same cases, ties the second Justice Harlan for the highest of the thirty-three. His furthest colleague was Rehnquist (§100), on the same side of a divided case only 21.1 percent of the time across 1,921 of them. And the drift series, on the tenth pass through this program's oldest question, gives a two-sided answer: his gap over the baseline grew from 12.5 points in his early terms to 28.3 in his last, a climb of 15.8, third largest on record, and both components are statistically real, 6.1 points of his own movement leftward and 9.7 points of a bench moving right beneath him. Where Blackmun did most of his own moving, Marshall was mostly moved past; the Court he had joined as its first Black justice spent his last decade leaving him at the edge he had not chosen.
He announced his retirement on June 27, 1991, and met the press the next day in the plainest voice in the building. Why was he leaving? 'I'm getting old and coming apart.' Should his successor be Black? He rejected the premise: 'There's no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They'll both bite.' Four days later the President named Clarence Thomas (§106), and the fight over that succession belongs to the chapter on Thomas. Marshall died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on January 24, 1993, of heart failure, at eighty-four. His casket lay in the Great Hall of the Court, where by the wire services' count some nineteen thousand people filed past it, and the funeral at Washington National Cathedral on January 28 drew more than four thousand. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
He had left one more argument behind. His instrument of gift to the Library of Congress, signed on October 24, 1991, restricted his 173,700 items to himself during his life and provided that 'thereafter, the Collection shall be made available to the public at the discretion of the Library.' The Library opened them on his death, and the Washington Post began publishing from the case files that May. Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a letter to the Librarian, said the Library had shown bad judgment; William Coleman, the family's lawyer and an old colleague from the Brown litigation, called the opening 'an act of destroying confidentiality'; the Librarian, James Billington, answered that 'we remain confident that we are carrying out his exact intentions in opening access to his papers after his death,' and that the Library had offered him, three days before he signed, the chance to add restrictions, and he had declined. The chapter records the dispute and notes the result: the files that handed historians the Court's inner workings of the 1970s and 1980s were his, by his own hand. When the Court met in his memory, the Chief Justice pointed to the words carved over the building's front door, Equal Justice Under Law, and said: 'Surely no individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall.'
The Voting Record
How Marshall voted in the 3,699 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1967 term through the 1990 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Marshall voted with Brennan more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 88.1% of their 2,213 divided cases — and with Rehnquist least, at 21.1%. See the matrices →Compared against the 13 colleagues Marshall shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And Marshall ended 15.8 points more liberal relative to those colleagues than at the start — the third-largest shift of the 27 justices with a long enough record to measure. See who changed →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Brown v. Board of Education
1954Holding · State-sponsored segregation of public schools is unconstitutional.
Role · Marshall argued the case as lead NAACP counsel; the Court's unanimous opinion was written by Chief Justice Warren (§88).
The defining victory of Marshall's career as an advocate and the legal foundation of the civil-rights movement.
Read the opinion →Stanley v. Georgia
1969Holding · The government may not criminalize the private possession of obscene material in one's own home.
Role · Marshall wrote for the Court.
A landmark of privacy and freedom of thought — 'a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read.'
Read the opinion →Furman v. Georgia
1972Holding · (Concurring) The death penalty as then administered was unconstitutional; Marshall argued it is cruel and unusual in all circumstances.
Role · Marshall concurred in the judgment that briefly halted executions nationwide.
The fullest statement of his lifelong view that capital punishment is unconstitutional, which he maintained in dissent for the rest of his tenure.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Thurgood Marshall changed America twice — first as the greatest civil-rights lawyer in the nation's history, then as its first Black justice. As director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund he argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court and won twenty-nine, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision that began the dismantling of legal segregation; 'Mr. Civil Rights' built the litigation campaign that remade the country. Named solicitor general and then, in 1967, placed on the Court by Lyndon Johnson, he served twenty-four years as a passionate liberal — the Court's conscience on race, poverty, and the death penalty, which he opposed in every capital case as unconstitutional. As the Court moved right around him he became a great dissenter, insisting on the perspective of the powerless. Juan Williams's biography is the accessible life; Mark Tushnet's studies chart the advocate. Start with Williams, read the story of Brown and the death-penalty dissents, and hear Marshall's own unsparing view of the founding.
The Bookshelf
The best one-volume life, by a journalist who interviewed Marshall extensively in his final years. Williams tells the whole epic — the Baltimore boyhood under segregation, the Howard Law training under Charles Hamilton Houston, the decades of dangerous civil-rights litigation across the South, the argument of Brown, the solicitor generalship, and the twenty-four years on the Court — with narrative drive and Marshall's own salty voice throughout. Warm but honest, it is the ideal starting point. (Earlier lives include Michael Davis and Hunter Clark's Warrior at the Bar, 1992, and Randall Bland's pioneering Private Pressure on Public Law, 1973; Goldman and Gallen's Justice for All pairs a short biography with selected opinions.) Times Books / Random House.
A full scholarly biography by a political scientist, published on the heels of Williams's and more focused on the law. Ball traces Marshall's lifelong war on racism from the NAACP campaigns through the Court's rightward turn, and is especially strong on the jurisprudence and the institutional fights. Where Williams gives the man, Ball gives the judge. Crown Publishers.
An intimate close-up by the pioneering Black journalist Carl Rowan, who knew Marshall for decades and drew on long, candid interviews. Less a formal biography than a vivid, opinionated portrait — Marshall's humor, anger, and profanity on full display — by a friend who was also a reporter. Little, Brown.
The definitive account of the formation — the Baltimore boyhood, Lincoln University, and the Howard Law years under Charles Hamilton Houston that turned Marshall into a lawyer. Gibson, a Baltimore law professor, mined local records to reconstruct the world that produced 'Mr. Civil Rights' before he was famous. The best book on where Marshall came from. Prometheus Books.
A dual narrative built around the 1967 confirmation hearings — the Southern senators' days of interrogation intercut with the life that had led Marshall to that table. Haygood, whose reporting inspired the film The Butler, uses the nomination fight to tell the whole story of the man and the movement. Vivid and sweeping. Alfred A. Knopf.
The definitive study of Marshall's work as a lawyer — the long campaign that culminated in Brown. Tushnet, who clerked for Marshall, reconstructs the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategy: the patient assault on 'separate but equal,' case by case, from the law-school and graduate-school cases through Brown itself, and the courage it took to litigate in the Jim Crow South. The essential account of the advocate before he became a justice. Oxford University Press.
The scholarly foundation for Making Civil Rights Law — a close study of how the NAACP, under Houston and then Marshall, built the campaign against school segregation from the ground up, choosing plaintiffs, courts, and arguments with strategic patience across a quarter-century. The book on the strategy behind Brown. University of North Carolina Press.
The Pulitzer Prize winner — King's gripping reconstruction of the 1949 Groveland case in Florida, where Marshall and the LDF defended four young Black men falsely accused of rape amid lynch mobs, a murderous sheriff, and Klan terror. It shows Marshall not in a marble courtroom but risking his life in the Jim Crow South, and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Harper.
The monumental history of Brown v. Board of Education — nearly 800 pages tracing the case from the plantation South to the Supreme Court, with Marshall and the LDF at its center. Almost fifty years on it remains the standard account of how segregation was overturned, and one of the great works of American legal history. Alfred A. Knopf.
The intertwined story of Charles Hamilton Houston and his student Thurgood Marshall — the mentor who built the legal theory and the protégé who carried it to victory over Plessy. A brisk dual narrative. For the fuller life of the mentor, see Genna Rae McNeil's Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (1983). Bloomsbury Press.
The companion to Making Civil Rights Law, and the essential study of Marshall the justice — the twenty-four years on the Court, the alliance with Brennan (§90), and the great dissents on race, poverty, and the death penalty as the Court moved right around him. Tushnet, his former clerk, is the indispensable guide to both halves of the career. Oxford University Press.
The essential documentary reader — Marshall across the whole life in his own words: NAACP arguments, the candid oral history he gave Columbia, speeches, and major opinions, gathered and framed by his biographer. The single best volume for hearing Marshall directly. Lawrence Hill Books.
Hundreds of Marshall's letters from the 1930s and 1940s — the years of dangerous fieldwork building the cases that became Brown. A ground-level view of the movement's daily grind, negotiation, and danger, in the voice of the young lawyer who ran it. Amistad.
Marshall's most famous speech, delivered as the nation prepared to celebrate the Constitution's two-hundredth anniversary — and a bracing refusal to celebrate uncritically. The framers' government, he said, 'was defective from the start,' requiring a civil war and civil-rights revolution to attain 'the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.' The credo of a man who had spent his life repairing the founders' work. Widely reprinted.
The case he won. Marshall argued Brown before the Supreme Court, and the unanimous opinion — written by Chief Justice Warren (§88) — held that separate educational facilities are 'inherently unequal,' overturning Plessy and beginning the end of legal segregation. It is the summit of his advocacy and the reason the rest of this shelf exists. Free online.
Marshall's great cause, argued at length in the case that briefly halted executions in America. Concurring in the judgment, he mounted an exhaustive argument that capital punishment is unconstitutional per se — excessive, discriminatory against the poor and Black, and, he insisted, a penalty an informed public would reject as morally unacceptable. He and Brennan (§90) alone held to that view in every capital case for the rest of their tenures, dissenting from every execution. Free online.
Marshall's anguished dissent as the Court, now with four Nixon appointees, blocked busing across the Detroit city-suburb line and effectively halted school desegregation in the North. 'Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together,' he warned. The moment the promise of Brown stalled. Free online.
Marshall's final dissent, filed days before he announced his retirement — a furious protest as the Court overruled two recent precedents on victim-impact evidence. 'Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court's decisionmaking,' he wrote, warning that the new majority would discard precedent whenever it had the votes. The valedictory of the Court's great liberal conscience. Free online.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The November 15, 1993 memorial: Solicitor General Drew Days presenting the Bar's resolutions, Attorney General Janet Reno, and Chief Justice Rehnquist presiding, on the twenty-four years and the career before them. In the front matter of the bound volume, which the Court posts whole.
An early book-length study, written while Marshall sat and nearly twenty years before he retired: a political scientist's account of the legal career, grown from a Notre Dame thesis, revised in 1993 to carry the story to the end of the Court years. Older than everything above it on this shelf. Both editions lend free at the Internet Archive.
A career's paper in 579 containers: 173,700 items, 231.6 linear feet, 1949 to 1991 with the bulk from 1961. The series follow the second half of the career, the Second Circuit, the solicitor generalship and then the Supreme Court file of 1967 to 1991, and the finding aid reads the shape of the tenure out of the paper: 'The opinion files generally document Marshall's many concurrences with the majority position of the court during his early years and the increase in his dissents as the court's position changed during the latter part of his tenure.' Free at the Library of Congress as a PDF.
Congress's memorial volume: 304 pages from the Government Printing Office in 1994, House Document 103-244, with a portrait, collecting the tributes spoken in both houses after Marshall's death in January 1993. A government document and so in the public domain; no scan was reached and it is not read.
Spencer Crew, the Robinson Professor of History at George Mason, on the whole career as one episode in a longer struggle: the Baltimore boyhood, three decades on the road for the NAACP trying segregation cases and pressing local communities to contest discrimination, then the Court and the clients without wealth or power. ABC-CLIO, September 2019, 280 pages, in the Black History Lives series. A reference-shelf life for students, and useful as that beside the full biographies.
A short life with the documents attached, in Routledge's Historical Americans series: Charles Zelden of Nova Southeastern on the NAACP advocate who won twenty-nine of thirty-two cases at the Court, the federal judge, and the first African American justice, followed by a set of primary sources that put Marshall in his own words. 228 pages, 2013, and addressed to students.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Williams, American Revolutionary — for the whole towering life in Marshall's own voice
- 2.Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law — for the advocate and the long campaign to Brown
- 3.Furman v. Georgia concurrence — for the lifelong case against the death penalty
- 4.The 1987 Bicentennial Speech — for his unsparing view of the founding, in his own words
- 5.Tushnet, Making Constitutional Law — for the twenty-four years as a justice and a great dissenter
Where the Papers Are Kept
The Thurgood Marshall papers at the Library of Congress are vast and, controversially, were opened to researchers immediately after his death — a rich and candid record of the NAACP campaigns, the solicitor generalship, and the Court years, including conference notes that illuminate the modern Court's inner workings. A major American archive. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The advocate as the greater career. Marshall may have changed the country more from the lectern than from the bench — Brown and the LDF campaign against the whole edifice of segregation outweigh, some argue, anything he wrote as a justice. Weigh the lawyer against the judge, and ask what it means that the most consequential figure in twentieth-century civil-rights law spent his most important years as an advocate, not a decider.
- The lonely dissenter. As the Court moved right, Marshall and Brennan (§90) became a two-man bloc dissenting from every execution and every retreat on race and poverty, insisting the Court hear the voice of the powerless. Study the role of the persistent dissenter who knows he is losing — the death-penalty dissents above all — and ask what such dissents accomplish for a future Court, or for the country, when they cannot command a majority.
- 'Defective from the start.' Marshall's 1987 refusal to celebrate the Constitution uncritically reframed the founding as a flawed beginning redeemed by struggle. Set his account against the reverent originalism ascendant in his last years, and against the arrival of his successor Clarence Thomas (§106), and ask what is at stake — for law, memory, and national self-understanding — in how Americans choose to tell the story of their founding document. Seat lineage: Tom Clark §86 → Thurgood Marshall → Clarence Thomas §106.