Thurgood Marshall - Timeline

Timeline

• 1908 – Born July 2 at Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
• 1930 – Graduates with honors from Lincoln University (cum laude).
• 1934 – Receives law degree from Howard University (magna cum laude) and begins private practice in Baltimore, Maryland.
• 1934 – Begins to work for Baltimore branch of NAACP.
• 1935 – Working with Charles Houston, wins first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson.
• 1936 – Becomes assistant special counsel for NAACP in New York.
• 1940 – Wins Chambers v. Florida, the first of twenty-nine Supreme Court victories.
• 1943 – Won case for integration of schools in Hillburn, New York.
• 1944 – Successfully argues Smith v. Allwright, overthrowing the South's "white primary".
• 1946 – Awarded Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
• 1948 – Wins Shelley v. Kraemer, in which Supreme Court strikes down legality of racially restrictive covenants.
• 1950 – Wins Supreme Court victories in two graduate-school integration cases, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents.
• 1951 – Visits South Korea and Japan to investigate charges of racism in U.S. armed forces. He reported that the general practice was one of "rigid segregation."
• 1954 – Wins Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, landmark case that demolishes legal basis for segregation in America.
• 1956 – Wins Browder v. Gayle, ending the practice of segregation on buses and ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• 1957 – Founds and becomes the first president-director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., a nonprofit law firm separate and independent of the NAACP
• 1961 – Defends civil rights demonstrators, winning Supreme Court victory in Garner v. Louisiana; nominated to Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President John F. Kennedy.
• 1961 – Appointed circuit judge, makes 112 rulings, none of them reversed on certiorari by Supreme Court (1961–1965).
• 1965 – Appointed United States Solicitor General by President Lyndon B. Johnson; wins 14 of the 19 cases he argues for the government (1965–1967).
• 1967 – Becomes first African American named to U.S. Supreme Court (1967–1991).
• 1991 – Retires from the Supreme Court.
• 1992 – Receives the Liberty Medal recognizing his long history of protecting individual rights under the Constitution.
• 1993 – Dies at age 84 in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
• 1993 – Receives Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously, from President Bill Clinton.

For more, see Bradley C. S. Watson, "The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall" in Frost, Bryan-Paul and Jeffrey Sikkenga. eds. History of American Political Thought (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2003). ISBN 0-7391-0623-6; ISBN 978-0-7391-0623-5; ISBN 978-0-393-92886-0.