Thurgood Marshall: Thirty-Two Cases, Twenty-Nine Wins
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
Thurgood Marshall graduated from Howard University Law School in nineteen thirty-three, first in his class. He had applied to the University of Maryland Law School the year before and been rejected because he was Black. Within two years of his Howard graduation, he had sued the University of Maryland and won, securing the admission of Donald Gaines Murray to the school that had refused Marshall himself.
He was twenty-seven years old.
He spent the next two decades as a traveling lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, driving through the segregated South to represent clients who had no other recourse, sleeping in Black families' homes because hotels and restaurants would not serve him, arguing his cases and moving on. He argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and won twenty-nine of them.
The most famous argument was Brown versus Board of Education, decided on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty-four. Marshall argued that racially segregated public schools caused measurable psychological harm to Black children and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court agreed, unanimously, overturning the doctrine of separate but equal that had governed American law since eighteen ninety-six.
President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in nineteen sixty-seven, the first Black justice in the Court's history. He served until nineteen ninety-one.
Charles Hamilton Houston, the Howard Law dean who designed the legal strategy Marshall executed, had died in nineteen fifty, four years before the victory. Marshall credited him fully, consistently, for the rest of his life. The plan had been Houston's. Marshall had carried it across the finish line.
