Marshall Takes Seat: First Black Supreme Court Justice

Twenty-nine victories in thirty-two Supreme Court arguments — including the case that dismantled school segregation — preceded the moment Thurgood Marshall raised his right hand on October 2, 1967, and became the first Black justice in the Court's 178-year history. President Lyndon Johnson, announcing the nomination five months earlier, had been characteristically blunt: "This is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man, and the right place." Marshall's path to the bench ran through the most dangerous courtrooms in the Jim Crow South. As chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1940 to 1961, he traveled to towns where local sheriffs offered no protection and where losing a case could mean a client's lynching. He argued Smith v. Allwright, which struck down whites-only primaries. He argued Shelley v. Kraemer, which banned racially restrictive housing covenants. And in 1954, he argued Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous decision that declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional and demolished the legal architecture of American apartheid. Johnson first elevated Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961, then made him Solicitor General in 1965 — the federal government's top courtroom advocate — before the Supreme Court appointment. Senate confirmation hearings were contentious; Southern senators grilled Marshall for days, but the final vote was 69-11. On the bench, Marshall served as the Court's liberal conscience for twenty-four years. He wrote influential opinions on press freedom, criminal defendants' rights, and the death penalty, which he opposed absolutely. His dissents in capital punishment cases drew on his firsthand knowledge of racial bias in the justice system. Colleagues recalled that Marshall's greatest tool in conference was storytelling — vivid accounts of representing Black defendants in Southern courts that made abstract legal questions viscerally human. Marshall retired in 1991, replaced by Clarence Thomas. He died in 1993, leaving a legal legacy that fundamentally altered what equal protection under the law means in America.