Thurgood Marshall, one of the most influential Americans of the 20th Century and the first black to be elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court, died Sunday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Washington. He was 84.
He had been in failing health since his retirement from the court in July 1991 and, according to Toni House, spokesman for the Supreme Court, died of heart failure. Justice Marshall had been scheduled to administer the oath of office to Vice President Al Gore at the inauguration last week but was hospitalized, and Associate Justice Byron White filled in for him.
President Clinton said he was “deeply saddened” by Justice Marshall’s death.
In a statement, the president said Justice Marshall was “a giant in the quest for human rights and equal opportunity in the whole history of our country. Every American should be grateful for the contributions he made as an advocate and as a justice of the United States Supreme Court.”
His death ends the career of a man who, with the possible exception of Martin Luther King Jr., had more influence on the lives of blacks and other minorities than any other person of his time.
But Justice Marshall’s influence went far beyond the boundaries of black America. He came to be a spokesman for the imprisoned and disenfranchised, the powerless and the destitute, those in society least able to help themselves against the powers of the majority.
Historian John Hope Franklin argues that if “you study the history of Marshall’s career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand when he speaks, he is not speaking just for black Americans but for Americans of all times.
“He reminds us constantly of the great promise this country has made of equality, and he reminds us that is has not been fulfilled.”
Former Illinois Appellate Court Justice R. Eugene Pincham said, “He was not only a conscience of the Supreme Court, he was the civil libertarian conscience for the nation. He tried desperately to make this nation genuinely live up to the mandates of the Constitution.”
Even before he was elevated to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall had become a household word for blacks. They called him “Mr. Civil Rights.”
His most celebrated case was Brown vs. Board of Education, which resulted in a landmark 1954 ruling that put to rest forever the “separate but equal” doctrine and outlawed public school segregation.
This case was the centerpiece of an era in which the civil rights movement found progress toward equality through the federal courts, using the Constitution to force desegregation of a range of institutions from interstate buses to schools.
In the quest for equal justice, Justice Marshall had argued 32 cases on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People before the Supreme Court, prevailing in all but three cases. Among his successes were the court’s striking down the “white primary” of the Texas Democratic Party in 1944, segregated seating on interstate buses in 1946, racially restrictive real estate covenants in 1948 and separate state law schools for blacks in 1950.
“I believe he has already earned his place in history,” President Lyndon Johnson said on June 13, 1967, when he nominated Justice Marshall to the Supreme Court. Meeting with reporters in the Rose Garden, Johnson said of the man: “I believe he earned that appointment. He is the best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place. I trust that his nomination will be promptly considered by the Senate.”
Justice Marshall, chief legal officer of the NAACP for 23 years until he was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York in 1962, was approved by a Senate vote of 69-11. All but one of the nay votes were cast by Southern senators, the exception being Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.), but during the debate Johnson was accused of using the appointment to try to appease blacks and end racial violence that was breaking out in many American cities.
On the opening day of the 1967-68 term, Justice Marshall took his seat as the 96th justice of the Supreme Court, replacing Tom C. Clark. As a leading figure of the civil rights movement, Justice Marshall had become a familiar figure at the high court.
In courtroom appearances, Justice Marshall, a great bear of a man at 6 feet, 2 inches tall, argued his causes in a relaxed manner, avoiding theatrics or self-righteousness. The New York Times said of his performance in the school desegregation case: “The quiet, scholarly voice that set forth the winning argument . . . might have been that of a sociologist.”
Justice Marshall has said in interviews that his father, a waiter and steward at a Maryland country club, inspired him to become a lawyer. “He did it by teaching me to argue, by challenging my logic on every point, by making me prove every statement,” he said.
Justice Marshall was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908, and named Thoroughgood, which was shortened and legally changed to Thurgood. He attended the segregated public schools of Baltimore, where his mother was a teacher. In 1926 he entered Lincoln University near Philadelphia, an elite school for blacks, and worked his way through as a grocery clerk and waiter.
Graduating cum laude from Lincoln in 1930, he decided against dentistry and entered law school at Howard University in Washington, finishing first in his class.
Justice Marshall joined the NAACP in 1936 and became chief counsel in 1938 when the NAACP established the Legal Defense Fund as a separate litigating arm. Leading the attack on racial barriers and injustice, Justice Marshall criss-crossed the South repeatedly and appeared in county courthouses in support of civil rights lawyers and their clients. It was the frequency and success of his travels that won him recognition as `Mr. Civil Rights.’
President John F. Kennedy moved Justice Marshall closer to the Supreme Court in 1961 by naming him to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, where his imprint was decidedly liberal. Then, in 1965, Johnson nominated him to succeed Archibald Cox as solicitor general, the third-ranking officer of the Justice Department who directs all government litigation before the Supreme Court and other federal courts.
Justice Marshall joined the Supreme Court in its twilight years of activism under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was strongly influenced by the surviving New Deal voices of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Among his fellow justices were the liberal William Brennan, an Eisenhower appointee; and New Dealer Abe Fortas, a Johnson appointee who was forced to resign in 1969 because of a conflict of interest.
Warren retired in 1969 and was replaced by Warren Burger, the first of four appointments by President Richard Nixon, who saw the court as a critical tool in his war on judicial activism and crime. Increasingly, Justices Marshall and Brennan were the lone dissenters as the court sided more often with prosecutors. They were the only justices, for instance, to oppose the death penalty unequivocally.
Justice Marshall was in the majority as the high court upheld busing as a remedy in school desegregation cases, struck down restrictive abortion laws, ordered Nixon to release his Watergate tape recordings that forced him from the White House, and invalidated Congress’ one-house vetoes of executive branch decisions.
By the late 1970s, Justice Marshall was openly frustrated with the Burger court, especially its imposition of intent as an element of proof in discrimination cases and its tendency to restrict the rights of criminal defendants.
In a rare appearance outside the high court, Justice Marshall told federal judges in 1981 that “the suggestion that we as judges take sides frightens me.”
His speech was an obvious response to an earlier address by Burger, who had criticized the American criminal justice system for providing “massive safeguards for accused persons.”
Justice Marshall said: “We must never forget that the only real source of power that we as judges can tap is the respect of the people. We will command that respect only as long as we strive for neutrality. If we are perceived as campaigning for particular policies, as joining with other branches of government in resolving questions not committed to us by the Constitution, we may gain some public acclaim in the short run. In the long run, however, we will cease to be perceived as neutral arbiters, and we will lose that public respect so vital to our function.”
Justice Marshall never lost sight of the fact that laws serve people rather than abstract principles. Addressing a 1973 world conference on law in the Ivory Coast, Justice Marshall said that in his opinion the whole thrust of the U.S. Constitution is “people are people.” He elaborated by telling his audience:
“People are people-strike them, and they will cry; cut them, and they will bleed; starve them, and they will wither away and die. But treat them with respect and decency, give them equal access to the levers of power, attend to their aspirations and grievances, and they will flourish and grow and, if you will excuse an ungrammatical phrase, join together `to form a more perfect union.’ “
On July 4, 1976, Justice Marshall suffered his first heart attack which began speculation that he might retire. The speculation continued for 15 years and liberals often joked that Marshall was holding on to deny President Ronald Reagan and later President George Bush a chance to replace him with a conservative.
Of speculation he might retire, Justice Marshall once told a reporter: “I have this deal with my wife. When I’m starting to get senile, she’s going to tell me. Then I’ll retire.”
He was openly critical of the Reagan-Bush appointments to the court. When Associate Justice David H. Souter was appointed, Justice Marshall dismissed him in a television interview. “When his name came down I listened to television and the first thing I called my wife, `Have I ever heard of this man?’ She said ‘No . . . I haven’t either.’ “
He said he would not vote for Bush for re-election. “It’s said that if you can’t say something good about a dead person, don’t say it. Well, I consider him dead.” Bush did not respond.
When Marshall retired in 1991, Bush nominated conservative government lawyer Clarence Thomas, a black, to replace him setting off one of the most acrimonious confirmation hearings in the nation’s history.
Justice Marshall’s first wife, Vivian Burey Marshall, died of lung cancer in 1955 after 26 years of marriage. They had no children. The next year, he married Cecilia Suyat, a native of Hawaii of Filipino descent who worked at the NAACP’s New York office. They had two sons, Thurgood and John.
No plans have been announced for funeral services.
Once, in 1980, when the city of Baltimore dedicated an 8-foot 7-inch statue of its first native son to serve on the Supreme Court and the nation’s first black justice, Justice Marshall chose the occasion to issue a sobering warning he would probably repeat today:
“Some Negroes feel we have arrived. Others feel that there is nothing more to do. I just want to be sure that when you see this statue, you won’t think that’s the end of it. I won’t have it that way. There’s too much work to be done.”
