Thurgood Marshall & the Civil Rights Movement

At Howard, Marshall came under the influence of Charles Hamilton Houston who stressed the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy vs. Ferguson, which established the legal doctrine of "separate and equal" (Thurgood). Marshall's first major court case was in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland and secured the admission to that university of an African American graduate from Amherst University, Donald Gaines Murray.

Marshall had a private law practice in Baltimore for a while, then moved to New York as a staff lawyer for the NAACP, and later became their Chief Counsel (Finkelman; Thurgood). From 1930 to 1961 he served as director and chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In his position with the NAACP, he helped develop and implement a strategy for fighting racial segregation throughout the United States. He

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in this position from 1967 to 1991, when he retired: he died two years later. During his tenure there, he continued his tradition of supporting the voiceless Americans, all the voiceless, not just the Blacks, and developed a sensitivity to the injustice of racial discrimination (Thurgood). Marshall promoted affirmative action to remedy the damage remaining from slavery and racial bias (Williams). He made it clear that although racial segregation was legally over, much more needed to be done to give equal education opportunities to Blacks to erase the economic disparity between Blacks and Whites. In his early years on the Court, he was part of the liberal majority, but the Court became increasingly conservative through Republican appointments in the 1970s and 1980s, and from then on he was often a dissenting voice. Thurgood Marsha managed to secure protection under the law for women, children, prisoners and the homeless, giving them a greater claim to the full rights of citizenship in America (Williams). Marshall rejected King's peaceful protests as rhetorical lightweights which had no permanent effect on society. He also rejected the violence of Malcolm X and his idea of building a separate Black nation. Marshall was
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