Thurgood Marshall Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights lawyer who used the courts to fight Jim Crow and dismantle segregation in the U.S. Marshall was a towering figure who became the nation's first Black United States Supreme Court Justice. He is …
Mar 21, 1981 · Pioneering civil-rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), successfully argued the case before the court. Marshall, who founded the LDF in ...
For the Petitioner: Led by Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP, Brown's attorneys argued that the operation of separate schools, based on race, was harmful to African-American children. Extensive testimony supported the contention that legal segregation resulted in both fundamentally unequal education and low self-esteem among minority students.
The NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall (who became the first black Supreme Court Justice in 1967), was successful in challenging the constitutional viability of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The Warren Court voted to overturn sixty years of law that had developed under Plessy. The Warren Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the …
Soon after, Marshall joined Houston at NAACP as a staff lawyer. In 1940, he was named chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which was created to mount a legal assault against segregation. Marshall became one of the nation's leading attorneys.
His mission was equal justice for all. Marshall used the power of the courts to fight racism and discrimination, tear down Jim Crow segregation, change the status quo, and make life better for the most vulnerable in our nation.
During his nearly 25-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Marshall fought for affirmative action for minorities, held strong against the death penalty, and supported of a woman's right to choose if an abortion was appropriate for her.
After graduating from Howard, one of Marshall's first legal cases was against the University of Maryland Law School in the 1935 case Murray v. Pearson. Working with his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall sued the school for denying admission to Black applicants solely on the basis of race.
Marshall's most famous case was the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case in which Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren noted, "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.".
Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights lawyer who used the courts to fight Jim Crow and dismantle segregation in the U.S. Marshall was a towering figure who became the nation's first Black United States Supreme Court Justice.
Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Marshall U.S. solicitor general and on Aug. 30, 1967, Marshall was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and joined the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first Black justice.
Charles Hamilton Houston. The first general counsel of NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston exposed the hollowness of the "separate but equal" doctrine and paved the way for the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation. The legal brilliance used to undercut the "separate but equal" principle and champion other civil rights cases earned Houston ...
In a 1938 Supreme Court case concerning the admission of a Black man to the University of Missouri, Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for the state to bar Blacks from admission since there was no "separate but equal" facility.
Houston's shrewd strategy worked, effectively paving the way for desegregation. While not rejecting the premise of "separate but equal" facilities, the Supreme Court ruled that Black students could be admitted to a white school if there was only one school. Houston's shrewd strategy worked, effectively paving the way for desegregation.
Houston left Howard University to serve as the first general counsel He played a pivotal role in nearly every Supreme Court civil rights case in the two decades before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Houston worked tirelessly to fight against Jim Crow laws that prevented Blacks from serving on juries and accessing housing.
At the same time, NAACP members were subject to harassment and violence.
The NAACP’s Early Decades. Since its inception, the NAACP has worked to achieve its goals through the judicial system, lobbying and peaceful protests. In 1910, Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment allowing people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote in 1866 to register without passing a literacy test.
In 1917, some 10,000 people in New York City participated in an NAACP-organized silent march to protest lynchings and other violence against Black people. The march was one of the first mass demonstrations in America against racial violence.
During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.
Today, the NAACP is focused on such issues as inequality in jobs, education, health care and the criminal justice system, as well as protecting voting rights.
During this era, the NAACP also successfully lobbied for the passage of landmark legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, barring racial discrimination in voting.
In its charter, the NAACP promised to champion equal rights and eliminate racial prejudice, and to “advance the interest of colored citizens” in regard to voting rights, legal justice and educational and employment opportunities.
The “separate but equal” doctrine introduced by the decision in this case was used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws until 1954, when it was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Implementation of the “separate but equal” doctrine gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate and equal public facilities and services for African Americans and whites. The “separate but equal” doctrine introduced by the decision in this case was used for assessing the constitutionality ...
The State of Louisiana (the Respondent) argued that it is the right of each State to make rules to protect public safety. Segregated facilities reflected the public will in Louisiana. Separate but equal facilities provided the protections required by the 14 th Amendment and satisfied the demands of white citizens as well. They also argued that because the Civil rights cases of 1883 made clear that segregation in private matters does not concern the government, a state legislature shouldn’t be prohibited from enacting public segregation statutes.
Overview. The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, mostly known for the introduction of the “separate but equal” doctrine , was rendered on May 18, 1896 by the seven-to-one majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (one Justice did not participate.) The case arose out of the incident that took place in 1892 in which Homer Plessy ...
Lawyers argued that segregation by law implied that African Americans were inherently inferior to whites. For these reasons they asked the Court to strike down segregation under the law.
Homer Plessy, a person of mixed race was deliberately chosen as a Plaintiff in order to support the contention that the law could not be consistently applied because it failed to define white and “colored” races. Even the railroad cooperated with the Committee of Citizens because to comply with the requirements of the Act they had to incur unnecessary expenses purchasing additional railroad cars.
On May 17, 1954 , the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The Court said, “separate is not equal,” and segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate". The doctrine was confirmed in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Though segregation laws existed before that case, the decision emboldened segregation states during ...
In 1953, Earl Warren became the 14th Chief Justice of the United States, and the Warren Court started a liberal Constitutional Revolution which outlawed racial segregation and "Separate but equal" throughout the United States in a series of landmark rulings.
Furthermore, the state and federal courts tended to reject the pleas by African Americans that their Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to federal, not state, citizenship. This rejection is evident in the Slaughter-House Cases and Civil Rights Cases .
Plessy's lawyer, Albion Tourgee, claimed Plessy's 13th and 14th amendment rights were violated. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and the 14th amendment granted equal protection to all under the law. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson formalized the legal principle of "separate but equal".
In the late 19th century, many states of the former Confederacy adopted laws, collectively known as Jim Crow laws, that mandated separation of whites and African Americans. The Florida Constitution of 1885 and that of West Virginia mandated separate educational systems. In Texas, laws required separate water fountains, restrooms, and waiting rooms in railroad stations. In Georgia, restaurants and taverns could not serve white and "colored" patrons in the same room; separate parks for each "race" were required, as were separate cemeteries. These are just examples from a large number of similar laws.
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each "race" were equal, ...
Board of Education of 1954. However, the subsequent overturning of segregation laws and practices was a long process that lasted through much of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, involving federal legislation (especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ), and many court cases.