The General of the Civil Rights Movement
If Martin Luther King Jr. is known as the moral and spiritual leader of America’s civil-rights movement, then Marshall should be known as its general. The man wanted results. Rather than simply make speeches, he made the law. He was the NAACP’s top attorney between 1938 and 1961; he won 29 out of the 32 separate civil-rights cases he brought before the Supreme Court.
Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks in the 1950s. Photo by Everett Collection / Shutterstock
Smith v. Allwright, in 1944, invalidated Texas’s white primary. Shelley v. Kraemer, in 1948, outlawed racially restrictive real-estate contracts. Sweatt v. Painter, in 1950, integrated the University of Texas’s law school. And probably the most famous of his cases was Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the separate-but-equal policy.
We’ll get to those cases soon. But first, a little bit about his humble beginnings…