Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court is shown at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, October 27, 1977. | AP Photo Senate confirms Thurgood Marshall, Aug. 30, 1967

On this day in 1967, the Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall as the first AfricanAmerican justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The Senate acted, following a prolonged debate, after President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to fill the seat of retiring Justice Tom Clark. In all, 69 senators voted to confirm him while 11 were opposed. Marshall would remain on the court for the next 24 years.

In nominating Marshall for a seat on the nation’s highest judicial tribunal, LBJ said: “It was the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.”


As chief counsel for the NAACP in the 1940s and ’50s, Marshall had devised the legal strategy that helped end official racial segregation in the United States.

After being rejected by the University of Maryland Law School, Marshall, the great-grandson of a slave, studied at the predominantly black Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. At Howard, he came under the wing of Charles Houston, a leading civil liberties lawyer, and, in 1933, graduated first in his class.

As the NAACP’s chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, Marshall argued more than a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, repeatedly and successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in public education. He won nearly all of those cases, including a groundbreaking victory in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the court overturned earlier decisions by finding that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal rights clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy named Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, a position he held until 1965, when LBJ tapped him to be the Justice Department’s solicitor general. At the time, this made him the highest-ranking black government official in American history. As solicitor general, he won 14 out of the 19 cases that he argued for the government.

Marshall once described his legal philosophy as: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”

As the nation marked the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, Marshall said: “The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today. …

“Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the … Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.”

Marshall retired in 1991 from the court. He died of heart failure in 1993 at age 84.

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM

