Marshall Confirmed: First Black Supreme Court Justice

The United States Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall as the first African American justice of the Supreme Court on August 30, 1967, by a vote of 69 to 11. The confirmation placed the man who had dismantled legal segregation from the outside into the institution whose rulings had sustained it for a century. Marshall's appointment by President Lyndon Johnson was both a recognition of his extraordinary legal career and a deliberate act of political symbolism during the most turbulent decade of the civil rights era. Marshall had been the chief legal strategist of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for over two decades. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which unanimously struck down racial segregation in public schools. His legal strategy was methodical: rather than attacking segregation directly, he built a series of cases that exposed the inherent inequality of "separate but equal" facilities, gradually narrowing the legal ground on which segregation stood until the doctrine collapsed entirely. Johnson nominated Marshall in June 1967 after appointing him Solicitor General in 1965, making him the first Black person to hold that position. Southern senators, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, subjected Marshall to hostile questioning during confirmation hearings, quizzing him on obscure constitutional trivia in an effort to portray him as unqualified. Marshall, who had argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any sitting justice, handled the questions with patience that masked justified anger. On the Court, Marshall served for 24 years as its most consistent liberal voice, particularly on issues of racial equality, criminal justice, and the death penalty. He was an unflinching opponent of capital punishment, dissenting in every death penalty case. His colleagues recalled that in conference, Marshall would tell stories from his years traveling the Jim Crow South to argue cases, reminding them of the human reality behind abstract legal principles. He retired in 1991, citing declining health, and died in 1993. His journey from Baltimore's segregated schools to the Supreme Court bench embodied the arc of twentieth-century American racial progress and its unfinished business.