Today is the 50th anniversary of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s swearing-in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on October 2, 1967. He was the Court’s 96th justice and the first African American to hold a seat on the Supreme Court.
Justice Marshall had a monumentally successful career arguing before the Supreme Court. As President Johnson noted, “Marshall is already in the front ranks of the great lawyers of this generation. He has argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court; he has won 29 of them. And that is a batting average of .900.” Marshall is just as famous for his role as counsel in several landmark civil rights cases, among them Shelly v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1 (1948)), Smith v. Allwright (321 U.S. 649 (1944)), and Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. (347 U.S. 483 (1954)). An earlier case, heard in the Maryland Court of Appeals, had some personal touchstones: The