Thurgood Marshall and his legal legacy

Thurgood Marshall

To some of us, Thurgood Marshall is the first black man ever to become Supreme Court Justice but to most Americans, he is more than that. His name today symbolizes complete equality and freedom, not only for blacks but also for every individual regardless of his color or race. To associate Marshall with law alone and to discuss his accomplishments in this context might be unfair to a person who devoted his whole life to the creation of a moral society where every individual is accorded equal rights and where color doesn't determine or plague civil rights. Thus Marshall was the man who taught us to value freedom and equality over 'heritage' or 'history'. He must therefore be remembered as a champion of civil rights and as someone who had the courage to reject rigid interpretations of law to create a better and more humane society for every individual.

Marshall was born in 1908, at a time when racial segregation and discrimination plagued the American society and when rejection due to skin color wasn't a rare phenomenon. Marshall wasn't exactly determined to eradicate segregation when he was young because he felt comfortable with his skin color and never had a burning desire to be treated as an equal. This is a strange discovery about someone who later came to be known as Mr. Civil Rights. Juan Williams (1990) writes: "As a boy, Marshall did not have a burning desire to fight segregation. He says he rarely felt uncomfortable about race. He lived in a nine house on Druid Hill Avenue, and both of his parents worked. His mother taught kindergarten, and his father held a variety of jobs, including working as the steward at the prestigious Gibson Island Club on Chesapeake Bay. Marshall was the great-grandson of a slave named Thoroughgood -- Marshall shortened it to Thurgood -- but both his grandfathers owned large grocery stores in Baltimore."

These circumstances gave rise to an air of indifference in his life where he didn't really care about being a black or being treated unfairly. But this apathy wasn't meant to remain intact for long because in 1930 Marshall faced cruel rejection on the basis of race when he applied to University of Maryland Law School. This incident was an eye-opener and awakened Marshall to the importance of skin color in prejudiced society of United States. Undaunted by this rejection, he applied to Howard University Law School where he was readily accepted. His time at this University had a great bearing on his life and on his understanding of law. It was here that he met, Charles Hamilton Houston, who had a profound impact on him as he taught his students to interpret the Constitution correctly and fairly. The most important legal interpretation that he wanted to overturn was the doctrine of 'separate but equal' established by Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. Marshall turned out to be the man to accomplish this task successfully several years later.

The first importance case that established his reputation as a great black lawyer came in 1933 when he sued University of Maryland Law School for not giving admission to a qualified black student, Donald Murray. In Murray v. Maryland, Marshall with Houston successfully argued against Maryland's policy to grant scholarship to black students fort studying elsewhere but not at Maryland. Levy (1998) writes, "This policy, Marshall and Houston contended, did not meet the separate but equal requirement laid down by Plessy. A federal appeals court agreed and ordered the university to admit Murray. The ruling offered a degree of vindication for Marshall, who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School years earlier." (Page 85)

Marshall had a profound impact on specific areas of law especially where legal interpretations of constitution and doctrines were concerned. He believed that even when rejecting established doctrines, history and years of social conditioning might cloud our opinions and views. He firmly maintained that a law or doctrine that violates ethics or morality and accords unfair treatment to some sections of society should be altered or overturned. He was of the view that such laws were responsible for creating an immoral and unfair social fabric.

Clay Smith (2001) writes: "For Marshall, to live in a moral society was to live in a society of freedom for all its citizens. Marshall believed in a free society as a natural right, confirmed as democratic by choice of a republican form of government cemented in the Constitution. He could not tolerate a promiscuous racist society. History and experience had taught Marshall that internal structures that insult individuals because of race, dashed human spirit, crippled imagination, lynched human flesh, denied the right to vote and allowed for unequal education was unwelcome conduct."

Marshall got an important opportunity to get his point across with his two landmark cases Smith v. Allright (1944) and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The former rejected "all-white primaries," and resulted in enfranchisement of 750,000 blacks citizens of southern states. The latter helped overturn Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of 'separate but equal' and stood against Harlan's dissent of 1898 in which in wrote: "The white race deems itself to be the dominate race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievement, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty." (163 U.S. 537 (1896) 559)

Marshall kept climbing the ladder of success because of his principled stand on the issue of civil rights. He knew his worth and was not willing to settle for less, which played an important role in his appointment as Justice of Supreme Court in 1967. Without faith in his abilities, he would have never been able to rise to the top, as he was a black man living in highly biased society. In 1960s, when John F. Kennedy decided to appoint him to Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Southern Congressmen and his own brother Robert Kennedy staunchly opposed his decision. (Bland, 1973) Robert Kennedy wanted to avoid confrontation with southern senators and therefore decided to offer district court appointment to Marshall instead of Second Circuit Court of Appeals. But Marshall wasn't to be so easily intimidated by opposition and when Kennedy said, "You don't seem to understand. It's this [the district court job] or nothing." Marshall replied calmly, "I do understand. The trouble is that you are different from me. You don't know what it means, but all I've had in my life is nothing. It's not new to me. So goodbye." (Perry, 1991, 96-97)