Thurgood Marshall, lawyer and civil rights activist who was the first African American member of the U.S. Supreme Court, serving as an associate justice from 1967 to 1991. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).
Thurgood Marshall, originally Thoroughgood Marshall, (born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. died January 24, 1993, Bethesda), lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1967–91), the Court’s first African American member. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which declared unconstitutional racial segregation in American public schools. Marshall was the son of William Canfield Marshall, a railroad porter and a steward at an all-white country club, and Norma Williams Marshall, an elementary school teacher. He graduated with honours from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in
Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), which recognized “intangible” inequalities between African American and all-white schools at the graduate level, Warren held that such inequalities also existed between the schools in the case before him, despite their equality with respect to “tangible” factors such as buildings and curricula. Specifically, he agreed with a finding of the Kansas district court that the policy of forcing African American children to attend separate schools solely because of their race created in them a feeling of inferiority that undermined their motivation to learn and deprived them of educational opportunities they would enjoy in racially integrated schools. This finding, he noted, was “amply supported” by contemporary psychological research. He concluded that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”