THURGOOD!!!

On this day, forty-six years ago the imitable Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Supreme Court Justice. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him on June 13, 1967 and he was voted to the most powerful court in the land by a Senate vote of 69-11 because he was the best person for the job.

He was the 96th person to hold that position, but the one thing he had over all of those that came before him was that he was the first Black man. His path to the Supreme Court is something worthy of a Hollywood movie. Following his older brother William Aubrey Marshall to the historically Black Lincoln University, his initial intentions were to study medicine and to become a dentist. He wasn't a student that took his studies seriously, getting suspended twice for questionable behavior. He found the debate team and became a star, even arguing against the allowance of African American professors to integrate at Lincoln. His famous classmate Langston Hughes described Thurgood as being "rough and ready, loud, and wrong".

He was denied entry to the University of Maryland Law School based on nothing more than his being Black. That denial was something that stuck with for the rest of his life. It guided his decisions in his professional life. He then applied to Howard University Law School and was accepted and it was at Howard where he met Dean Charles Hamilton Houston. Mr. Houston wanted all his charges to apply the tenets of the Constitution to ALL American citizens, and he was on a mission to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson which established "separate but equal".

In 1933, Thurgood's first major court case was when he sued the school that denied him entry, Maryland Law School to get them to admit a young Black man who was a graduate of Amherst University. Thurgood won. He then followed his mentor and Dean, Mr Houston to NYC and became the chief legal counsel of a small grassroots organization named the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While there, not only did he successfully argue almost every case he took before the Supreme Court, he also drafted Constitutions for the emerging African nations of Ghana and the country now known as Tanzania.

After successfully arguing the landmark case Brown v. The Board of Education, President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. While there, Thurgood Marshall wrote over 150 decisions and was untouchable as well as unbeatable. He was the voice for those that were voiceless and he fought tirelessly for immigrants. He argued in front of the Supreme Court and never loss, which is why Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the bench, and why he was overwhelmingly confirmed.

He was a great Justice and an even better man. The court was weakened by his retirement and the world was weakened by his death. The second Black person confirmed to the Court has not the integrity Thurgood had, nor does he care about the voiceless. Instead of trying to fill his shoes, he's chosen to ignore them entirely. Thank you for your service to your country Mr. Marshall, thank you for being the great man you were and for being the Justice every Justice should strive to be like.