50 Years After Historic Confirmation to Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall’s Legacy Continues To Shape Future

Fifty years ago today, Thurgood Marshall (pic­tured) was con­firmed as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice. 

Marshall’s lega­cy is indeli­bly linked to his his­toric vic­to­ry in 1954 as coun­sel in Brown v. Board of Education, break­ing down the bar­ri­ers of ​“sep­a­rate but equal” seg­re­gat­ed pub­lic edu­ca­tion. But he is equal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with his rep­re­sen­ta­tion of cap­i­tal defen­dants in racial­ly charged cas­es in the Jim Crow South and his long­stand­ing belief — first artic­u­lat­ed in a con­cur­ring opin­ion in the Court’s land­mark 1972 deci­sion in Furman v. Georgia strik­ing down all exist­ing death-penal­ty statutes — that ​“the death penal­ty is an exces­sive and unnec­es­sary pun­ish­ment that vio­lates the Eighth Amendment.” 

A grand­son of slaves and a sur­vivor of an attempt­ed lynch­ing by Tennessee police offi­cers, Marshall devot­ed his life to ensur­ing that all peo­ple, irre­spec­tive of race, enjoyed the rights of full cit­i­zen­ship and the equal pro­tec­tion of the law. This inex­orably drew him to the issues of lynch­ing and capital punishment. 

Seven days after the Baltimore native received his law license in October 1933, a 23-year-old intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled black man, George Armwood, who had been in cus­tody accused of the attempt­ed assault and rape of an elder­ly white woman, was lynched in near­by Somerset County, Maryland. Marshall was one of ten lawyers to peti­tion the gov­er­nor seek­ing anti-lynch­ing leg­is­la­tion and call for an inves­ti­ga­tion into state police involve­ment in the lynching. 

Marshall won his first Supreme Court case in 1940, argu­ing Chambers v. Florida, which estab­lished that coerced con­fes­sions obtained by police through duress and vio­lence are inad­mis­si­ble at tri­al. That year, he found­ed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and served as its first Director-Counsel, rep­re­sent­ing numer­ous black defen­dants charged with crimes in Southern courts. 

In 1941, Marshall rep­re­sent­ed W.D. Lyons, an illit­er­ate 21-year-old black share­crop­per beat­en into con­fess­ing to mur­der­ing a white fam­i­ly and burn­ing down their home. Enduring racial epi­thets from an ini­tial­ly hos­tile white com­mu­ni­ty, Marshall sub­ject­ed the police who had framed Lyons to with­er­ing cross-exam­i­na­tion and showed that they had obvi­ous­ly lied on the stand. Lyons was con­vict­ed and — after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his appeal — exe­cut­ed, but his­to­ri­ans say the case awak­ened Marshall to the abil­i­ty of lawyers to empow­er oppressed communities.

Later, Marshall won retri­als for three young African-American men who had been false­ly accused of rap­ing a 17-year-old white woman in Lake County, Florida. Two of the ​“Groveland Four” (a fourth young man charged in the case had been lynched by a white mob after escap­ing from cus­tody) were wrong­ly sen­tenced to death; one of them was mur­dered and the oth­er shot sev­er­al times by a sher­iff while being trans­port­ed to their retri­al. The sur­viv­ing defen­dant was con­vict­ed and resen­tenced to death, but received a last-minute com­mu­ta­tion. The third defen­dant — who was 16 at the time — received a life sen­tence. In April 2017, the Florida leg­is­la­ture issued an apol­o­gy for the killings and wrong­ful con­vic­tions and asked Governor Rick Scott to issue posthu­mous par­dons for the four. 

In November 1946, Marshall near­ly was mur­dered. Tennessee law enforce­ment inter­cept­ed his car and placed him in the back of an unmarked car after he had won an acquit­tal for one of 25 black man charged with riot and attempt­ed mur­der in the wake of local racial vio­lence. They drove him down iso­lat­ed roads and, Marshall lat­er said, ​“were tak­ing me down to the riv­er where all of the white peo­ple were wait­ing to do a lit­tle bit of lynch­ing.” A white lawyer and a white jour­nal­ist saw the abduc­tion and fol­lowed the unmarked car, foil­ing the lynching. 

The Legal Defense Fund won acquit­tals in 23 of the 25 Tennessee riot cas­es. Marshall wrote in his con­cur­rence in Furman that “[i]t is evi­dent … that the bur­den of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment falls upon the poor, the igno­rant and the under­priv­i­leged mem­bers of soci­ety.” He firm­ly believed that the pub­lic would do away with the pun­ish­ment if they under­stood the facts of how the death penal­ty actu­al­ly was applied. The ques­tion for him in Furman was ​“not whether a sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of American cit­i­zens would today, if polled, opine that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is bar­barous­ly cru­el, but whether they would find it to be so in the light of all infor­ma­tion presently available.”

Justice Marshall’s influ­ence con­tin­ues to have broad effect today. In addi­tion to his influ­ence on pub­lic edu­ca­tion and crim­i­nal jus­tice, he was instru­men­tal in rul­ings estab­lish­ing that states can­not legal­ly enforce restric­tions on the sale of homes to minori­ties and can­not bar non­whites from vot­ing in pri­ma­ry elec­tions, where many of the key elec­toral deci­sions are made.