October 2 - Thurgood Marshall

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On this day, in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was officially sworn in as the 96^th United States Supreme Court justice and the first African American to be elevated to the highest court in the land. Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Thoroughgood (he later officially took a third of the letters out of his name in order to make it easier to pronounce) was the son of a railroad porter and a teacher. His parents cultivated a deep respect for the nation’s laws, and in particular the United States Constitution, from an early age. For fun, Thurgood’s father would take his two sons to the courthouse to watch deliberations in whatever case was being argued at the time and then engage them in lively debates about what they saw. Those debates extended to the dinner table and would expand to include daily current events. Needless to say, by the time he reached high school, Thurgood was an expert at clearly and concisely proving his point.

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After graduating from Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School (a year early, I might add), Thurgood began attending classes at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Actually, attending might not be the word I’m looking for here. In the beginning, he didn’t do much in the way of learning, preferring to spend his time playing pranks on fellow students (he was suspended for that, twice) and yucking it up as the star of the debate team. His classmates included other soon-to-be-famous people like Langston Hughes and Cab Calloway. As is true for so many men, he didn’t get serious about life until he met a certain young woman by the name of Vivian Burey. Buster, as she was known to friends and family, was a social activist at the nearby University of Pennsylvania and is widely credited as not only a calming influence on her future husband, but the sustaining force behind his future successes. After the pair married in 1929, Thurgood began to take school seriously and eventually graduated from Lincoln cum laude. He also started to participate in sit-in protests against segregation and to become committed to social change in America.

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Thurgood graduated from Lincoln, he considered continuing his studies at the University of Maryland School of Law. Because of the school’s deep seated policy of segregation, he instead opted to go to Howard University’s law school. At Howard, he studied under the influence of Charles Hamilton Houston, the school’s dean and a prominent lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Many of the views Thurgood held about discrimination came directly from Charles, a man who helped dismantle a good chunk of the nation’s Jim Crow laws over the course of his life. The time spent around his wife and his dean showed up in Thurgood’s academic work: he graduated in 1933 at the top of his class.

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Within a year of conquering law school, Thurgood had opened his own law firm and was working his first case for the NAACP, Murray v. Pearson. Donald Murray was denied admission to the University of Maryland law school entirely because he was black. Since there were no state run schools for black students, the NAACP argued that Maryland hadn’t fulfilled the “separate but equal” clause of Plessy v. Ferguson.  The Maryland Supreme Court agreed. Working directly under his old mentor, Charles, Thurgood was integral in helping the NAACP win their case, decisively ending segregation in Maryland (only in theory, of course; in practice is always another matter). Because of his dedication and prowess in the courtroom, the NAACP offered Thurgood a full time position in 1936. He accepted.

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By 1940, Thurgood was arguing (and winning) cases on behalf of the NAACP before the Supreme Court of the United States. His first, Chambers v. Florida, made it illegal for confessions that had been coerced out of suspects to be used in a trial. He then became founder and executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. As head of the fund, Thurgood began arguing a wide variety of civil rights cases before SCOTUS, including Smith v. Allwright (which overturned racially discriminating voting laws), Shelley v. Kraemer (which struck down racially restrictive housing covenants) and Brownv. Board of Education (which determined that “separate but equal” wasn’t actually obtainable in public education and ended segregation country wide). All told, Thurgood was counsel for 32 cases that came before SCOTUS. He won 29 of them.

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During this period, Thurgood suffered a personal tragedy when Buster, his wife of 25 years, died from lung cancer in February 1955. Shortly after Buster’s death, he met Cecilia Suyat, another civil rights activist who both worked for the NAACP and took his fancy. The pair were married in December 1955, had two sons together and lived happily ever after until Thurgood’s death 38 years later.

In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Thurgood to a newly created seat on the United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit. A group of racist Southern senators opposed his appointment. It didn’t effectively matter. For the first several months, he simply served on the court in a recess appointment capacity until the confirmation was pushed through. Thurgood remained in his judgeship until President Johnson asked him to be the United States Solicitor General, the fourth highest office in the Justice Department, in 1965. With his confirmation as Solicitor, Thurgood became the highest ranking black government official America had ever had. For the next two years, he would return to arguing cases before SCOTUS, albeit technically from the opposite side he was used to. Of the 19 cases in which he represented the government, he won 14 (ironically, one of the ones he lost was Miranda v.Arizona which also involved confessions that were deemed inadmissible and makes you wonder how hard he tried on that one).

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Thurgood’s life changed once again in June 1967, when Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark retired from the court and President Johnson nominated his Solicitor General to fill the vacancy. The process this time around was at least quicker if not less contentious. On August 30, 1967, the United States Senate confirmed Thurgood’s nomination by a vote of 69-11. All eleven of the nay votes and several of the abstentions came from Southern senators (of both parties it should be mentioned). Once again, it didn’t matter. The yea votes, representing 86% of the country’s population, carried the day. Just over a month later, Thurgood was sworn in and he would spend the next 24 years ticking off conservatives with his mostly liberal viewpoint.

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While he spent most of his career with SCOTUS championing abortion rights and opposing the death penalty, Thurgood was instrumental in interpreting laws in other arenas as well. He helped define materiality (that’s deciding how significant each fact is to a particular case) in securities law, broadened the scope of who was entitled to a trial by jury and even had a finger in income tax laws during the savings and loan crisis of the early Nineties. By early 1991, it was becoming clear that Thurgood’s declining health wouldn’t allow him to carry out his duties for much longer. In June of that year, thoroughly unhappy that a Republican would be choosing his successor, he stepped down. President George H.W. Bush then nominated Clarence Thomas, another African American but of a decidedly different political leaning, to fill the vacancy.

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Thurgood spent the next 18 months quietly enjoying what was ever more clearly limited time with his wife and family. He passed away from heart failure on January 24, 1993 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In the months and years following his death, Thurgood has been honored with numerous memorials including a statue near the Maryland State House, a federal courts building in Washington, DC, schools named after him ranging from middle schools to collegiate law schools, the airport in Baltimore and sainthood in the Episcopal Church (I’m not kidding; May 17 is his feast day). In 2006, a one-man show, Thurgood, premiered starring James Earl Jones. Laurence Fishburne performed the show on Broadway and, after a special White House performance in 2011, helped dedicate a painting done of Thurgood that now hangs in the Presidential Mansion, a reminder to all who see it of how far America has come and how very far we still have to go.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Liberty Belle Riverboat