I. Early Experiences
Marshall was born in 1908, and he grew up in Baltimore, a strictly segregated city. His parents were mulattoes, his father a waiter and his mother a public school teacher. Although Marshall grew up in the oppressive environment of Jim Crow, his parents taught him to be proud of his ancestry. Marshall attended Lincoln University, an African-American institution in Pennsylvania whose students knew that they “constituted a potential black elite” and were zealous about racial equality. Marshall studied the humanities, was a debater, and ultimately decided to go to law school. Had he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, he would have been rejected because the school did not admit blacks. Rather, he attended Howard, an all-black school.
Howard's first black president, Mordecai Johnson, wanted to make the school more socially conscious, and he brought like-minded instructors, including Harvard Law graduate and civil rights activist Charles Houston, to the law faculty. Houston believed that black lawyers “should be social engineers” and use the law to defeat racial discrimination. Marshall became Houston's protégée and graduated as the class valedictorian. After graduation, Houston took Marshall on a trip through the South to “impress on [him] the devastation of segregation,” after which Marshall assisted Houston in representing a black defendant in a murder case in Virginia. The defendant was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but as Marshall later explained: “We won it. If you got a Negro charged with killing a white person in Virginia and you got life imprisonment, then you've won. Normally, they were hanging them in those days.” Marshall “internalized” Houston's teachings and “developed an undying faith in the Constitution and ‘the rule of law.”’
After the trial, Marshall returned to Baltimore and set up a solo law practice, representing mostly poor people, defendants in criminal cases, personal injury plaintiffs, and tenants. He learned firsthand the importance of the constitutional rights of the accused, such as the right not to be questioned by police officers without a lawyer present. He also realized that committed lawyers could make a difference in the lives of poor people--debtors, tenants, consumers, job seekers, and others--by asserting their rights under the law and thereby mitigating inequalities in wealth and power. He later argued in a speech that lawyers had a duty to help reduce inequality:
The lawyer has often been seen by minorities, including the poor, as part of the oppressors in society. Landlords, loan sharks, businessmen specializing in shady installment credit schemes--all are represented by counsel on a fairly permanent basis. But who represents and speaks for tenants, borrowers, and consumers? Many special-interest groups have permanent associations with retained counsel. Who speaks for the substantial segment of the populace that such legislation might disadvantage? Outside of the political processes, I think the answer is clear. Lawyers have a duty in addition to that of representing their clients; they have a duty to represent the public, to be social reformers in however small a way.
While practicing law in Baltimore, Marshall also became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a tie that was to prove enormously important both to him and to the Association. In the early years of the twentieth century, the NAACP spearheaded African Americans' effort to eliminate segregation in part by bringing lawsuits. According to Marshall, the organization chose a court strategy
partially because other avenues of redress appeared to be closed, and partially because of the deep and abiding faith the planners had in the rule of law, and the efficacy and feasibility of instigating social reform through reliance upon the Constitution--which after all was designed to insure protection of the basic values of our society.
On behalf of the NAACP, Marshall successfully sued the State of Maryland, forcing it to desegregate the law school. He also negotiated with white store owners who sold to blacks but would not hire them, and, along with John L. Lewis, tried to unionize black and white steel workers. Marshall's work as a solo practitioner in Baltimore, both in his own practice and in the cases he brought on behalf of the NAACP, brought him into daily contact with the massive injustice of Jim Crow, a legal system that was just beginning to display some fissures. At the same time, however, it solidified his conviction that a committed and skillful lawyer could accomplish a considerable amount in the struggle to create a more just and equal society. In 1936, Houston hired Marshall to assist him in the NAACP's national office in New York City. Two years later, Marshall became the NAACP's chief lawyer, a position he held until 1961 when he became a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. During his years as the NAACP's chief counsel, Marshall “traveled the country using the Constitution to compel courts to protect the rights of black Americans.” The work was dangerous, and at times, Marshall could have ended up dead or in the same jail as those he was defending. Working in small white-supremacist towns, Marshall lived the segregated life he was challenging. Though many of his innocent clients were sent to prison, Marshall's work paid off with important legal precedents. In addition to his trial work, Marshall argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court, winning twenty-nine. Among these were some of the most important cases of the twentieth century, including Brown v. Board of Education, Sweatt v. Painter, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, and Shelley v. Kraemer.
Thus, when Marshall joined the Supreme Court, he brought to it an atypical background and a distinctive perspective, a perspective that the Court had not seen before and has not seen since. It “was not simply that he was the first black to sit on the Court, but that he had spent much of his professional life working among the oppressed and the insurgent.” Like the other Justices, Marshall knew the world of power, privilege, and achievement, but he “also knew the other side of the tracks, not simply as an observer but as one who had called it home.” He knew
how the world worked, and how it worked against those at the bottom. He knew what police stations were like, what rural Southern life was like, what the New York streets were like, what trial courts were like, what hard-nosed local political campaigns were like, what death sentences were like, what being black in America was like . . . and he knew what it felt like to be at risk as a human being. And he knew the difference that law could make in all those places.
