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Thurgood Marshall

2 bytes added, 23:06, March 30, 2008
Mr. Marshall was well known for dedicating his life to studying the rule of law, as well as fighting racism and discrimination. He faced racism on a regular basis, even being denied acceptance into the University of Maryland Law School because he was African American. He was able to integrate this school by winning a lawsuit in ''Murray v. Pearson'', which prevented another African American student from studying there on account of race.
Mr. Marshall worked hard to chip away at the doctrine of "[[separate but equal]]" created by ''[[Plessy v. Ferguson]]''. In 1938, he was appointed by Charles Hamilton Houston, chief legal counsel for the [[NAACP]] at the time, to serve as the leader of NAACP lawyers to argue in civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. Between 1938 and 1961, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them. Some cases include ''Smith v. Allwright'' (1944), which extended voting rights and desegregation by holding that primary elections cannot be restricted to any race. Other cases include ''Morgan v. Virginia'' (1946), which was regarding state segregation laws for interstate buses. Mr. Marshall argued in this case that the laws were unconstitutional because they violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, successfully overturning them. In 1950, in "''Sweatt v. Painter"'', he was able to chip away at ''Plessy'' even more when the Supreme Court ruled that state law schools must accept applicants regardless of race, even if "separate but equal" schools exist.
However, Mr. Marshall's greatest Supreme Court victory was ''[[Brown v. Board of Education]]'', which outlawed segregation in education, dissolved the doctrine of "separate but equal," overturning the ''Plessy'' decision, and extended many of the rulings of previous cases he won before the Supreme Court. The ruling thrilled African Americans, as well as people of all other races. The ''Chicago Defender'', an African American newspaper, declared after the ruling, "Neither the atom bomb nor the hydrogen bomb will ever be as meaningful to our democracy as the unanimous declaration of the Supreme Court that racial segregation violates the spirit and the letter of our Constitution." <ref>Tolerance.org: Teaching Tolerance: BROWN V. BOARD: An American Legacy http://www.tolerance.org/teach/magazine/features.jsp?ar=485</ref>
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