Marshall's Legacy: A Lawyer Who Changed America

Thurgood Marshall was the only member of the Supreme Court who knew how it felt to be called a nigger. In the 1940s and '50s when he roamed the courtrooms of the South as chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Marshall suffered all the indignities of segregation. He once told a judge in North Carolina he had eaten the same meal in the same restaurant where the judge had dined the night before -- with one difference. "You had yours in the dining room," said Marshall. "I had mine in the kitchen."

Very little about the law was abstract to Marshall. He not only suffered its worst failure, the long reign of legal segregation, but he was also the architect of one of its greatest triumphs. He was the victorious attorney in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark decision that prohibited racial segregation in public schools. As a Justice, Marshall sometimes helped to change American law. As a civil rights lawyer he changed America.

"He is truly a living legend," says Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. "It is hard to think of another lawyer in the 20th century who has played a more important role." In 1967, when Lyndon Johnson chose him as the first black Supreme Court Justice, Marshall was a man resolved to continue the revolution he had helped to set in motion. But his 24 years on the court were increasingly frustrating. The last Justice chosen by a Democratic President, he joined the liberal court of Chief Justice Earl Warren in its waning years. Over the next two decades, as a succession of Republican appointees were named to the court, Marshall found himself pushed into the role of perennial dissenter. In the term just ended -- and several before it -- he wrote not a single important majority decision.

Before the conservative tide prevailed, however, Marshall helped to ensure liberal victories in dozens of cases involving issues he cared most about: civil liberties, affirmative action, the rights of the accused, abortion, the death penalty. He read the Constitution in the broad light of its Preamble, with its spacious promises to "promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty . . ." He took that to mean the most important role of the Constitution was to ensure fair treatment for the disadvantaged in a world where judges, police and legislatures could not be counted on to exercise their power fairly.

Marshall's willingness to see broad promises where conservatives saw narrow guarantees was precisely what made them cheer his departure last week. "Marshall's jurisprudence was Exhibit A of the judicial activism that conservatives have been trying to do something about for the last 20 years," complained Alan Slobodin of the Washington Legal Foundation. "He imposed his personal views into clauses of the Constitution where it wasn't authorized."