On this day in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When confirmed by the Senate he would be the court’s first African-American justice.
Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional.
Thoroughgood (he changed his name to Thurgood when he was in second grade) Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Norma and William Canfield Marshall. His father held various jobs as a waiter in hotels, in clubs, and on railroad cars, and his mother was an elementary school teacher.
Marshall attended the Colored High and Training School (later Frederick Douglass High School) in Baltimore, graduating in 1925 with honors. He then enrolled at Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the oldest college for African Americans in the United States. Upon his graduation with honors in 1930 with a bachelor’s degree in American literature and philosophy, Marshall—being unable to attend the all-white University of Maryland Law School—applied to Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., and was admitted. Marshall graduated in June 1933 ranked first in his class, and he passed the Maryland bar examination later that year.
In one of his first cases as a Lawyer, he sued the University of Marylandon behalf of Donald Gaines Murray, an African American whose application to the university’s law school had been rejected on account of his race. In that case—Murray v. Pearson—Judge Eugene O’Dunne ordered that Murray be admitted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that it violated equal protection to admit white students to the law school while keeping blacks from being educated in-state.
He went on from there to become one of the greatest leaders in the history of the African-American struggle for freedom and equality and spearheaded the creation of the legal foundations of the civil rights movement.
Uh oh…the rabbi is at it again…
SIGNS and SIGNS
Today is the birthday, in 1949, of Dennis Locorriere, with American rock band Dr Hook who had the 1970s hits ‘The Cover of Rolling Stone’, ‘A Little Bit More’, ‘When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman’ and ‘Sylvia’s Mother’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXVO_vF2Io
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