Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on January 24, 1993. He was eighty-four. Heart failure had been coming for a long time. Born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908, the son of a Pullman-car steward and a teacher, he was named Thoroughgood and shortened it himself. Lincoln University and then Howard Law — because Maryland's white law school would not have him — made him the lawyer Charles Houston was training to dismantle Plessy in pieces. He rode Jim Crow trains with a typewriter and a file of affidavits, arguing teacher-pay and graduate-school cases in county seats that did not want him housed. Brown v. Board of Education was the summit of that method: not a single thunderclap but years of records showing that "separate" was a lie about equality. He won twenty-nine of thirty-two arguments before the Supreme Court as the NAACP's counsel. Kennedy put him on the Second Circuit. Johnson made him solicitor general, then, in 1967, the first Black justice. On the Court he dissented as the majority narrowed the rights he had spent a life widening. He told clerks that his job was to be a nuisance in the conference and a memory in the opinions. He kept the NAACP's old case files in his head the way other men keep birthdays. Baltimore remained the city that had refused him a classroom and given him a grievance. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Bethesda was the hospital. Baltimore was the beginning.