The Off-Key Bard
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This Day in History — Thurgood Marshall Takes His Seat on the Supreme Court

On this day in 1967

On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall took his seat as the first Black Supreme Court justice, decades after arguing Brown v. Board before that same bench.

The Off-Key Bard enters the Supreme Court chamber in 1967. A new justice is about to take his place on the bench — but he has stood before this Court many times before.

"Once, he came here to argue that segregation violated the Constitution. Now he would interpret that Constitution from the other side of the bench."

On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall took the judicial oath and his seat as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, becoming the first Black justice in the Court's history. The moment was historic on its own, but Marshall arrived at the Court with an extraordinary distinction: long before becoming a justice, he had been one of the country's most consequential civil-rights attorneys and had personally argued cases before the institution he was now joining.

There is an interesting technical detail to the date. Marshall had already taken the constitutional oath on September 1, 1967, administered by Justice Hugo Black. On October 2, when the Court opened its 1967 term, the Clerk administered the judicial oath, after which the Court's marshal escorted Marshall to his seat on the bench. The Court was once again at its full complement of nine justices.

The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer

Marshall's journey there had begun decades earlier. Born in Baltimore in 1908, Marshall attended Lincoln University before entering Howard University School of Law, where he studied under the influential lawyer and educator Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall graduated first in his law-school class in 1933. Houston and Marshall would become central figures in a carefully constructed legal campaign against racial segregation, particularly in education.

By the late 1930s, Marshall was working with the NAACP, eventually becoming one of the leading attorneys in its legal campaign against segregation. Rather than attempting to overturn the entire system in a single case, civil-rights lawyers challenged its foundations through a succession of lawsuits involving voting, housing, graduate education, and public schools. Marshall succeeded Houston as NAACP special counsel and became a central figure in that strategy.

Again and again, that work brought Marshall to the Supreme Court. Cases such as Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, Sweatt v. Painter, and others challenged different aspects of legally enforced racial discrimination. Marshall argued more than 30 civil-rights cases before the Supreme Court and won all but five.

Brown v. Board

But one case would become inseparable from his name: Brown v. Board of Education.

The case commonly called Brown was actually a group of school-segregation cases originating in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Marshall and a team of NAACP lawyers argued that government-mandated racial segregation in public education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state-mandated segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, rejecting the application of the old "separate but equal" doctrine to public education. Marshall had helped persuade the nation's highest court to dismantle one of the central legal foundations supporting segregation.

Thirteen years later, he would sit on that Court himself.

From Advocate to Judge

Marshall's path between those two moments also included significant federal service. President John F. Kennedy nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961, an appointment that faced fierce opposition from Southern senators and ultimately required a recess appointment before Marshall could take his seat. President Lyndon B. Johnson later named him Solicitor General of the United States in 1965, making Marshall the federal government's chief advocate before the Supreme Court — and the first Black American to hold that post.

Then, on June 13, 1967, Johnson nominated Marshall to succeed retiring Justice Tom C. Clark on the Supreme Court, calling it "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." The Senate confirmed him on August 30, 1967, and Marshall ultimately served on the Court for 24 years, from 1967 until his retirement in 1991.

A Historic Symbolism

His appointment also carried symbolism that would have been difficult to miss. The Supreme Court had existed since 1789. For nearly 180 years, every justice who occupied one of its seats had been white. Marshall joined the Court only three years after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and two years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, during a period when the country was still confronting deeply entrenched racial discrimination and disputes over the meaning and enforcement of constitutional equality.

Marshall's jurisprudence on the Court reflected many of the issues that had defined his career. During his tenure, he frequently addressed questions involving civil rights, equal protection, criminal procedure, access to justice, and the death penalty. But his 24-year record encompassed the enormous range of constitutional and federal questions that come before the Supreme Court, and like every justice, his influence came through opinions, dissents, votes, and the Court's internal deliberations.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Marshall's story is the relationship between the two phases of his career. As an attorney, he had asked judges to interpret the Constitution in ways that dismantled government-enforced racial discrimination. As a justice, he became one of those judges.

"He'd stood before that bench before,
And argued what the law was for.
Then history turned the scene around —
His seat upon the Court was found."

Marshall's appointment did not end America's disputes over race, equality, or constitutional rights, nor did it erase the barriers that had kept Black Americans from institutions of political and legal power. But it marked an unmistakable change in an institution whose decisions Marshall himself had spent decades helping to reshape.

On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall walked into the Supreme Court chamber and took his seat as a justice. The lawyer who had once stood before the Court and successfully argued against segregated public schools had become the first Black American entrusted with interpreting the Constitution from the Supreme Court bench itself.

Sources

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