Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice

by Larry S. Gibson, Thurgood Marshall Jr. (Foreword by)

Overview

Like the movie Marshall, this book—theonly biography of Thurgood Marshall to be endorsed by Marshall's immediate family—focuses on his early civil rights struggles andsuccesses beforeBrown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall was the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century. He transformed the nation's legal landscape by challenging the racial segregation that had relegated millions to second-class citizenship. He won twenty-nine of thirty-three cases before the United States Supreme Court, was a federal appeals court judge, served as the US solicitor general, and, for twenty-four years, sat on the Supreme Court. Marshall is best known for achievements after he relocated to New York in 1936 to work for the NAACP. But Marshall's personality, attitudes, priorities, and work habits had crystallized during earlier years in Maryland. This work is the first close examination of the formative period in Marshall's life. As the author shows, Thurgood Marshall was a fascinating man of contrasts. He fought for racial justice without becoming a racist. Simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic, Marshall was a passionate advocate, yet he maintained friendly relationships with his opponents. Young Thurgood reveals how Marshall's distinctive traits were molded by events, people, and circumstances early in his life. Professor Gibson presents fresh information about Marshall's family, youth, and education. He describes Marshall's key mentors, the special impact of his high school and college competitive debating, his struggles to establish a law practice during the Great Depression, and his first civil rights cases. The author sheds new light on the NAACP and its first lawsuits in the campaign that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. He also corrects some of the often-repeated stories about Marshall that are inaccurate. The only biography of Thurgood Marshall to be endorsed by Marshall's immediate family, Young Thurgood is an exhaustively researched and engagingly written work that everyone interested in law, civil rights, American history, and biography will want to read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616145729
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/04/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	413
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Larry S. Gibson (Baltimore, MD) is a professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in Baltimore, Maryland, where he has been on the faculty for thirty-seven years. He is also a practicing lawyer with the firm of Shapiro, Sher, Guinot, and Sandler. Among his many accomplishments was legislation that renamed Maryland's major airport, the Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Read an Excerpt

FOREWORD by Thurgood Marshall Jr.
 

Many works about my father have been assembled, ranging from formal works of scholarship to popular biographical profiles to children’s books, movies, and documentaries. With this detailed and carefully crafted volume, Professor Larry S. Gibson has crafted a unique and engrossing portrait.

The photograph that graces the cover speaks volumes about the content of this book. The tall, striking, and confident figure is unmistakable, yet it is an image of Thurgood Marshall that is rarely if ever seen, even by those who have studied his life or who knew him well.

The cover photo is just one of countless treasures from my father’s early and formative years that Professor Gibson has unearthed. Through the rich collection of childhood anecdotes; the insights into the colorful assemblage of relatives, mentors, and legal clients who shaped my father’s development; and the recounting of the challenges and opportunities my father encountered in his local community and throughout our country, this book weaves together the events that formed the foundation for my father’s career.

Professor Gibson’s attention to detail and thorough research is apparent throughout this book. His sleuthing has led him to courthouses and clerk’s offices as well as to professional and personal correspondence in many locales. That trove of information has enabled him to understand the ways in which my father applied his talent and skill and faced his own personal challenges.

Readers will see in this book the origins of my father’s penchant for storytelling and his desire to act as an advocate for fairness on behalf of those who are marginalized in American society. Professor Gibson sets the stage with a gritty sense of the tone of the times when my father was born in Baltimore, which at that time was a segregated city not far from communities that often tilted toward vigilante justice instead of the rule of law. This book brings to life the array of relatives and friends who surrounded my father as he grew up and demonstrates how an early focus on academics and debate honed his skills and determined his interests for alifetime. With classmates like Cab Calloway and Langston Hughes, there was little room in his social circle for shrinking violets or backbenchers. And there was plenty of room for creative fun and mischief. Law school brought those experiences together in new ways and gave my father the tools he needed to live a life of consequence.

This book also details the breadth of my father’s legal work. By the time my father began arguing cases before the US Supreme Court, he had already handled a diverse array of client interests that included divorces, simple assaults, and capital murder cases. Here, too, are chronicled my father’s early involvement with politics, the civil rights movement, and the NAACP, as well as his early efforts to bring equality to education, voting, housing, and the fabric of American society. Young Thurgood provides that information in an enjoyable way, even to the point of letting us know about the kind of employment my father found after the workday was over to make ends meet.

Professor Gibson has given us a book that contains many new factsand insights and presents them in compelling prose. The result is as entertainingas it is unique, poignant, and informative.

Thurgood Marshall Jr.

Table of Contents

Foreword Thurgood Marshall 9

Preface 11

Chapter 1 Is There an Investigation Taking Place? 19

Chapter 2 The Baltimore Grocers' Grandson 35

Chapter 3 Marshall's High School Years 61

Chapter 4 Lincoln University 81

Chapter 5 Educating a Social Engineer 107

Chapter 6 A New Lawyer Joins the Brotherhood 125

Chapter 7 Buy Where You Can Work 153

Chapter 8 Black and White and Red All Over 171

Chapter 9 The Civil Cases 189

Chapter 10 The Criminal Cases 201

Chapter 11 The Murder of Kater Stevens 215

Chapter 12 The First Step on the Road to Brown 231

Chapter 13 Becoming a Leader among Lawyers 259

Chapter 14 The Baltimore County High School Case 273

Chapter 15 Financial Pressures and Career Decision 291

Chapter 16 Commuting Back for Equal Teacher Pay 309

Conclusion 327

Acknowledgments 335

Notes 341

Index 395

Editorial Reviews

"A well-researched and engaging biography and a fine addition to Marshall scholarship.” —Kirkus Reviews “Succeeds in making Marshall's story immediate and vital.” —Publishers Weekly“[A]n insightful portrait of a complex man." —Booklist“The most accurate book ever published about my husband." —Cecilia S. Marshall, Wife of Thurgood Marshall“A page-turner. Its compelling story is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand a great man and the history of the civil rights movement. I enthusiastically recommend this book.”—Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Professor of law, Harvard Law School, and author of The Presumption of Guilt“Gibson vividly recounts the remarkable journey that shaped one of the most influential icons of the twentieth century.”—Marc H. Morial, President and chief executive officer of the National Urban League“A triumph of discovery and restraint, Young Thurgood transports readers into a vivid, indomitable black culture that equipped this legal giant to remake our world.”—Taylor Branch, Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Cartel“I commend [this book] to every American who wishes to better understand our nation's ongoing struggle for universal civil rights.”—Elijah E. Cummings, US Congressperson from Maryland“A powerful account of Marshall's formative years and new insight into the early years of the NAACP.”—Benjamin Jealous, President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

From the Publisher

In his debut, Gibson (Univ. of Maryland School of Law) looks at the early years of the legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993). Marshall, a brilliant legal mind, became the first black Supreme Court justice in 1967, and before that, he was the chief counsel for the plaintiffs in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, in which school segregation was declared unconstitutional. But while Marshall's law career has been amply covered by other biographers, his earlier life has gotten relatively short shrift. This biography, by contrast, focuses solely on the first 30 years of Marshall's life. Growing up, Marshall intensely discussed politics and race relations with his father. "He never told me to be a lawyer, but he turned me into one," Marshall later said. Indeed, Gibson writes that Marshall inherited his family members' assertive and deeply hardworking natures. Marshall experienced segregation firsthand, attending an all-black high school; he refined his brilliant debating style on the debate team there and, later, at historically black Lincoln University. Gibson also covers Marshall's time at Howard University Law School and his first cases as a Baltimore lawyer, which led to his work with the NAACP and civil rights law. The author, who met Marshall a few times in the 1970s and '80s, writes in his introduction of how he wished to correct the record regarding some details of Marshall's early life--noting, for example, that while some sources have claimed that Marshall was a mediocre student before law school, Gibson's research found that Marshall had in fact graduated high school with honors at the age of 16. But this biography also deftly evokes the atmosphere in which Marshall developed his talents and effectively sketches the many people and events that influenced him. A well-researched and engaging biography and a fine addition to Marshall scholarship.

Kirkus Reviews