Title
Honoring the life and legacy of Thurgood Marshall on the 50th Anniversary of his swearing-in to the United States Supreme Court.
Body
WHEREAS, October 2, 2017, marks the 50th Anniversary of the swearing-in of Thurgood Marshall as the first African-American justice of our nation's highest court; and
WHEREAS, Thurgood Marshall, the grandson of a slave, was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908. When Justice Marshall was a child, his father would use his days off to take his children to watch court proceedings, and the family would often argue the cases afterwards over the dinner table; and
WHEREAS, While attending Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, Justice Marshall began to memorize the U.S. Constitution after he was made to read it as punishment for pulling pranks; and
WHEREAS, Justice Marshall attended college at Lincoln University in Oxford, PA, graduating cum laude in 1930 and leading the college debate team. While there, his classmates included luminaries such as poet Langston Hughes, jazz musician Cab Calloway, and the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. He met his first wife, Vivian Burey, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania, during a weekend trip to Philadelphia in 1929; and
WHEREAS, He graduated as the valedictorian of his class from Howard Law School in 1933. In 1935, five years after the University of Maryland Law School denied him admission because of his race, he won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, which desegregated that same law school; and
WHEREAS, Justice Marshall was the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1940 until 1961, ultimately winning 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated the U.S. public education system. He won his first case before the Supreme Court, Chambers v. Florida, when he was only 32; and
WHEREAS, In 1961, Justice Marshall was appointed by Preside...
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