August 30, 1967: The 1st Black Justice On the U.S. Supreme Court

August 30, 1967: President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court of the United States. This made him its 1st black Justice.

Most new Justices are not familiar to the general public before their appointments. Marshall was: He was a man whose story would have to be told even if he had never received this appointment.

He was born on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore. On my 1st visit to that city, in 1987, my hotel was across the street from the Federal Courthouse. Although it was named for the recently-deceased Congressman Edward Garmatz, there was a statue of Marshall outside. It was the 1st time I had ever seen a statue of someone still living. In his case, he was even still serving on the Supreme Court. (Although a check of the facts shows that Garmatz was also still alive when the Courthouse was named for him.)

He attended Lincoln University, the country's oldest school for black students, outside Philadelphia in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he was a classmate of writer Langston Hughes. With the University of Maryland School of Law segregated, he went to the one at Howard University in Washington, D.C., known as "The Black Harvard."

In 1935, working as assistant to his former Howard professor, Charles Hamilton Houston, who was now the director-counsel for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he won the case of Donald Gaines Murray, which ordered the desegregation of... the University of Maryland School of Law.

Key to this decision was the fact that the State of Maryland did not provide funding for, to use the expression used by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, "separate by equal" facilities: It was funding a law school for white residents of the State, but not black ones. In 1936, Marshall, again working under Houston, won a similar case with the University of Missouri.

Houston, a Washington native and a graduate of Harvard University School of Law, became known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow." This was a bit premature, but he had found a way around the segregation laws known as "Jim Crow": "If you want it 'separate but equal,' I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that you will have to abandon your separateness." He returned to Howard in 1938, with Marshall succeeding him as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Fund. Houston died in 1950, before seeing Marshall's greatest success.

The full name of the case was Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a welder working for a railroad, and an assistant pastor. His daughter, Linda Carol Brown, was in the 3rd grade, and had to walk 6 blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, an all-black school, 1 mile away. Sumner Elementary School, all-white, was just 7 blocks away -- 1 block longer than the walk to the bus.

Thurgood Marshall led the legal team for the Browns. The defense counsel was John W. Davis, a former Congressmen from West Virginia, a former Solicitor General of the U.S., a former U.S. Ambassador to Britain, the Democratic Party's nominee for President in 1924, and a staunch segregationist. Davis was 81 years old, and spoke in flowery prose to support segregation. (He would be dead within a year, and is largely forgotten today.)

Marshall was 45, at the height of his powers, and spoke plainly: "The only possible justification for segregation is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as possible. And now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for."

In a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which ruled that "separate but equal" facilities be provided in public places. In Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In 58 years, SCOTUS had gone from 1-8 in favor of integration to 9-0.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to be a Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, covering the States of New York, Connecticut and Vermont. In 4 years, he authored 98 majority opinions. Not one of them has ever been overturned.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to be the 1st black U.S. Solicitor General, whose job is to argue in favor of the federal government when it is a party in a case before the Supreme Court. 

Not only had his 1954 opponent Davis held that post, but so had William Howard Taft, later to become the only man to serve as President and as a Justice of the Supreme Court. So had former Justices Stanley Reed and Robert H. Jackson. This was a signal that LBJ was preparing to make Marshall the 1st black Justice on the Supreme Court.

For 2 years, SCOTUS had no vacancy. So LBJ decided to create one: He got Nicholas Katzenbach, his Attorney General, to take a post as an Under Secretary of State, and appointed Ramsey Clark to be the new Attorney General. In order to avoid a conflict of interest, LBJ convinced Clark's father, Justice Tom Clark, to retire.

On June 13, LBJ announced Marshall's appointment. On August 30, the U.S. Senate confirmed by by a vote of 69-11. Which means that 20 Senators didn't vote. These were all Southern Democrats, and Johnson personally asked them not to vote at all, and they agreed. Not that it would have mattered, but it certainly made them look better than the 11 who did vote against him.

Marshall became a reliable member of a liberal coalition on the Court, under Chief Justices Earl Warren (1967-69) and Warren Burger (1969-86). But when William Rehnquist was promoted from Associate Justice to Chief Justice by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the Court took a much more conservative turn. The retirement of William J. Brennan, a fellow liberal, in 1990 left him feeling depressed about the Court's progress.

By 1991, Marshall had had enough, and retired. At the press conference where he announced it, a reporter, concerned about his health, asked, "What's wrong with you, sir?" Marshall said, "What's wrong with me? I'm old! I'm getting old, and coming apart." He died on January 25, 1993, at the age of 84.

He had been married twice, and had 2 sons: Thurgood Marshall Jr. worked in the Clinton Administration and chaired the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service in the Obama Administration; and John W. Marshall served as Director of Public Safety for the Commonwealth of Virginia for 8 years, making him the longest-serving person in the history of the Cabinet of Virginia's Governors.

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August 30, 1967 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox, 2-1 at Yankee Stadium. The American League Pennant race was incredibly tight: The Red Sox came into this game just half a game ahead of Minnesota and Detroit, and 2 1/2 ahead of Chicago. In contrast, the Yankees were 15 1/2 games back, and were struggling to avoid a repeat performance of the previous season's last-place finish. So every win was key for the Red Sox in what became known as their "Impossible Dream" season.

And the most key player was Carl Yastrzemski, on the way to winning the AL's Triple Crown. In the top of the 11th inning, he hit a home run off Al Downing, who had gone the distance for the Pinstripes. This made a winning pitcher of John Wyatt, who pitched 4 innings in relief of Jerry Stephenson. Mickey Mantle did not play in this game.

* The New York Mets lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 2-0 at Busch Memorial Stadium. Larry Jaster took a 4-hit shutout into the 9th inning, and Ron Willis finished it. Tim McCarver, who would later broadcast for the Mets (and the Yankees) hit a home run for the Cardinals.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Washington Senators, 5-1 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.)

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Atlanta Braves, 11-9 at Atlanta Stadium (It was renamed Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in 1975.) Roberto Clemente went 2-for-5 with 2 RBIs. Willie Stargell went 2-for-4 with a home run and 4 RBIs. Joe Torre went 3-for-5 with a home run and 3 RBIs. Hank Aaron went 1-for-4, and did not hit a home run.

A year earlier, in the Braves' 1st game in Atlanta, Torre hit the 1st major league home run at the stadium, but Stargell hit one that won the game.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Pete Rose went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Johnny Bench, who made his major league debut 2 days earlier, got his 1st major league RBI, a sacrifice fly off Chris Short in the 2nd inning; and his 1st major league hit, a single off Short in 7th.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Houston Astros, 4-1 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Ernie Banks went 0-for-4 with an RBI groundout. Joe Morgan went 2-for-5 for the Astros.

* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Cleveland Indians, 6-5 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. (Both teams played at facilities named Municipal Stadium.) Danny Cater singled home the winning run in the bottom of the 12th inning.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Minnesota Twins, 4-2 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson each went 1-for-4, and Frank's hit was a 2-run home run, off Dean Chance in the top of the 10th inning. Like Downing, Chance had pitched an entire extra-inning game but lost. Harmon Killebrew went 0-for-3 with a walk, and eventual Rookie of the Year Rod Carew went 1-for-3 with a walk and an RBI.  

* The California Angels beat the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 at Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim). Al Kaline went 1-for-4.

* And the Los Angeles Dodgers beat their arch-rivals, the San Francisco Giants, 9-3 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Ron Fairly hit a home run in support of Don Drysdale. Willie Mays went 1-for-4 with a walk.