Thurgood Marshall

He married Vivien ‘Buster’ Burey, in 1929. The couple did not have any children.

After his first wife’s death, he married Cecilia Suyat in December, 1955. The couple had two sons together; one of whom was aide to President Bill Clinton and the other, a former United States Marshals Service Director.

He passed away due to heart failure on January 24, 1993 in Maryland at the age of 84.

Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908 to Norma and William Marshall, in Baltimore, Maryland. His ancestors were slaves who were from the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo.

He studied at Frederick Douglass High School and was one of the top-achievers in class. He was so good that he graduated a year ahead of his peers in 1925 and was placed in the top three ranks.

As he grew older, he enrolled at Lincoln University and his interest in academics began to diminish. He was even suspended twice for playing pranks on fellow students. In his second term at the university, he slowly became associated in university protests and was involved in a sit-in protest against racial segregation at a movie theater.

At the university, he was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha guild. He married young and his marriage in 1929, led him to take his studies seriously. He soon graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in humanities, majoring in American literature and philosophy.

He initially wanted to join Maryland School of Law, but he did not because of the institution’s segregation policy. He then went on to study law at the Howard University School of Law and graduated from this university in 1933, securing first rank in class.

After his graduation, he set up private practice in Baltimore and began working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1936.

In 1936, the same year of opening private practice, he managed to successfully represent his client filing suit against the University of Maryland Law School for its racial policy, ending the racial segregation policy in the process.

In 1940, he won his first U.S. Supreme Court ‘Chambers v. Florida’ case at the age of 32. He was also appointed as the Chief Counsel for the NAACP the same year.

The 1940s was an extremely crucial period for Marshall as he fought a number of cases, winning most of them including the ‘Smith v. Allwright’ case in 1944. Four years later, he also won the ‘Shelly v. Kraemer’ case.

In 1950, he successful argued two civil rights cases before the Supreme Court including the ‘McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents’ case and the ‘Sweatt v. Painter’ case.

Thurgood Marshall is best remembered for his jurisprudence in the arena of civil rights and criminal proceedings. During his time as the Justice of the Supreme Court, he accumulated a liberal record that involved strong backing for Constitutional protection of individual rights, especially the rights of criminal suspects. He was also instrumental in changing the laws, pertaining to ‘segregation’ and other liberal interpretations of controversial social issues. One of his major works today is his decision to support the right to abortion in the landmark 1973 case, ‘Roe v. Wade’, among many others.