'The best I could with what I had': the legacy of Thurgood Marshall - photographic tribute

FOR more than 50 years he has been the conscience of America's courtrooms--a reproving voice that has steadfastly challenged juries and jurists to compel the nation to abide by its pledge of liberty and justice for all. Wielding the principles of the U.S. Constitution, he battled discrimination in every legal arena up to the Supreme Court. His victories helped release the entire country--North and South, Blacks and Whites--from the suffocating grasp of legislatively sanctioned segregation. Even upon his elevation to the high court 24 years ago, he remained a champion of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

So when esteemed Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, 83, announced his retirement, many were saddened. For Marshall's opinions on a wide range of issues--including his support of Affirmative Action programs and freedom of choice on abortions and his opposition to the death penalty--have endeared him to many.

Born on July 2, 1908, in fiercely segregated Baltimore, Marshall seethed under the heel of Jim Crow. His father, William, who worked as a steward at the prestigious all-White Gibson Island Club on Chesapeake Bay, and his mother, Norma, an elementary schoolteacher, installed in both Thurgood and his older brother, Arbrey, a strong sense of racial pride. And it was William Marshall who imbued young Thurgood with his mettel. "If anyone calls you nigger," the elder Marshall declared, "you not only have my permission to fight him, you got my orders."

An argumentative and mischievous sstudent at Baltimore's Douglass High School, Marshall was made to read the U.S. Constitution aloud as punishment for his many transgressions. By the time he graduated, he could recite most of it from memory. Still, his interest in a law career was yet to be stirred.

When he enrolled in Lincoln University in Oxford, Pa., in 1925, his sights were set on becoming a dentist. But a run-in with a biology teacher (who failed him) derailed those aspirations. As a talented debater, he gravitated to law and enrolled in the Howard University School of Law up n graduation from Lincoln in 1930.

At Howard, he came under the tutelage of Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice dean of the school, who would mold the still irascible young Marshall into one of the finest courtroom's tacticians in the country.

Marshall graduated from Howard magna cum laude in 1933, and began practicing in Baltimore. Shortly thereafter, he teamed up with his mentor, Houston, then special counsel for the NAACP, on a high-profile case that would help launch him into the civil rights litigation that would consume him for the rest of his life. The case involved Donald Murray, a Black college graduate who sought admission to the University of Maryland School of Law, which did not accept Blacks and had earlier rebuffed Marshall. Marshall and Houston scored a victory, arguing that segregation violated the moral creed upon which the country was founded.

In 1938, when Houston resigned from the NAACP to reenter private practice, Marshall signed on to replace him, beginning a glorious chapter in the Civil Rights Movement. Carrying the banner of the NAACP, Marshall tenaciously battled segregation in courts across the country, particularly in the hostile South. "Certainly no lawyer, and practically no member of the bench, had Thurgood Marshall's grasp of the doctrine of law as it affects civil rights," said the late William H. Hastie, the first Black to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

He appeared before the Supreme Court 32 times, winning 29 cases. He was the architect of the legal strategy that led to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed school segregation and sounded the death knell for the segregated system.

In 1961, Marshall was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the School Circuit. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him solicitor general. And on June 13, 1967, President Johnson announced his nomination of Marshall for the Supreme Court. Marshall was confirmed by the Senate on August 30, 1967. In 24 years on the court, his extraordinary ability to see the human dimensions of legal doctrine helped shape opinions even after the court took a decidedly conservative turn with the elevation of Reagan and Bush appointees.

When asked by a reporter how he would like to be remembered, Marshall's response was typically direct: "He did the best he bould with what he had," was his unadorned reply.

In truth, Marshall did more than most. And he leaves a legacy of opinions and dissents that have enriched American jurisprudence with his uniquely generous sympathies and insightful common sense.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group