Legal education and practice in Baltimore
Marshall was born in Baltimore, graduated from Lincoln University in 1930 and received his law degree from Howard University in 1933. At Howard he studied under Charles Hamilton Houston, whose programme emphasized meticulous preparation for lawyers seeking to challenge racial discrimination through the courts.
Marshall then practised in Baltimore and provided counsel to the local NAACP branch. He and Houston worked on Donald Gaines Murray's effort to enter the University of Maryland law school, securing a significant result in 1935. Such litigation translated an individual's exclusion into a test of the responsibilities of publicly supported education.
NAACP litigation and Brown
He joined the NAACP's national legal staff in 1936 and later became its leading counsel. From 1940 to 1961 he also directed the Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The work depended on local lawyers, families and communities who supplied cases and sustained challenges to discrimination.
Marshall was a leading advocate in the litigation that produced the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision against state-imposed school segregation. The result drew on years of coordinated legal work. Implementation remained a separate struggle, with further cases and enforcement required after the constitutional ruling.
Federal service and the judicial record
John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the federal Second Circuit in 1961. He became solicitor general in 1965, representing the United States before the Supreme Court, and joined that Court as a justice in 1967. He remained there until retiring in 1991, having moved through the distinct roles of advocate, government lawyer and judge.
His papers preserve draft opinions, correspondence among justices, memoranda and voting records. They document sustained concern with equality, the rights of criminal defendants and opposition to capital punishment, including dissents as the Court's direction changed. He donated the papers to the Library of Congress in 1991 and died in 1993.