Thurgood Marshall Confirmed to the Supreme Court (1967)
On August 30, 1967, the United States Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, making him the first African American to sit on the nation's highest court. The confirmation, by a vote of 69 to 11, marked the culmination of a legal career devoted to dismantling racial segregation in America. Marshall would go on to serve nearly 24 years on the bench, becoming one of its most influential liberal voices.
A Civil Rights Legal Pioneer
Before ascending to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall built a formidable reputation as a civil rights attorney. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908, Marshall attended Howard University School of Law after being denied admission to the University of Maryland's segregated law school. He later became chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization he helped found in 1940. Over the following decades, Marshall argued 32 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them, an extraordinary record that established him as one of the era's most effective litigators. His crowning achievement came in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Court unanimously rejected the doctrine of "separate but equal" and ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. That decision reshaped American education and became a cornerstone of the broader civil rights movement. Marshall's courtroom successes made him a target of hostility in the segregated South, where he sometimes traveled under threat of violence while investigating cases. His work laid the legal groundwork for the dismantling of Jim Crow laws nationwide, and by the mid-1960s he was widely regarded as the nation's foremost civil rights lawyer, a reputation that positioned him for further advancement within the federal judiciary.
Did You Know?
Thurgood Marshall was originally named "Thoroughgood" at birth but shortened it to "Thurgood" in second grade, finding the longer name too cumbersome to write repeatedly. Decades later, this simplified name would appear on Supreme Court opinions that reshaped American constitutional law.
The Path to Nomination and Confirmation
President Lyndon B. Johnson, seeking to advance civil rights through his judicial appointments, named Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961 and then appointed him U.S. Solicitor General in 1965, the first African American to hold that post. On June 13, 1967, Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the retiring Justice Tom C. Clark. Johnson later said he wanted the American people to know "his kind of justice" would sit on the Court. Marshall's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee proved contentious, as several Southern senators pressed him with pointed questions about constitutional interpretation and his judicial philosophy, viewed by many observers as an attempt to derail or delay his confirmation. Despite this opposition, the full Senate voted 69 to 11 on August 30, 1967, to confirm Marshall's appointment. He took his judicial oath on October 2, 1967, becoming the 96th justice of the Supreme Court and the first African American to serve in that role. His swearing-in was a historic milestone, occurring just over a decade after Brown v. Board of Education and amid the ongoing struggles of the civil rights movement, symbolizing significant, if incomplete, progress toward racial equality within American institutions.
Legacy on the Bench
Marshall served on the Supreme Court from 1967 until his retirement in 1991, consistently championing individual rights, criminal defendants' protections, and civil liberties. He was a reliable member of the Court's liberal wing, often aligned with fellow justices William J. Brennan Jr. and later Harry Blackmun. As the Court's composition grew more conservative during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly under Chief Justices Warren Burger and William Rehnquist, Marshall increasingly found himself in dissent, notably on issues involving the death penalty, which he opposed in all circumstances, and affirmative action, which he staunchly defended. He retired from the Court in 1991 at age 82, citing declining health, and was succeeded by Justice Clarence Thomas. Marshall died on January 24, 1993, at the age of 84. His legacy endures both through his transformative pre-judicial legal work and his nearly quarter-century on the bench, during which he consistently advocated for the marginalized and disenfranchised. Numerous schools, courthouses, and public buildings across the United States now bear his name, and his portrait hangs prominently in institutions honoring American legal history. Marshall's life traced a remarkable arc from a young Black lawyer barred from his home state's law school to the highest court in the land, embodying the transformative possibilities of the civil rights era he helped define.