On this day in 1967 Thurgood Marshall became 1st African American confirmed as Supreme Court Justice

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That was Marshall’s style, fearless and indefatigable. If Martin Luther King Jr. was the moral and spiritual leader of the civil-rights movement, Marshall was its general, and he wanted results. Instead of making speeches, he made law. As the NAACP’s top attorney from 1938 to 1961, he argued 32 civil-rights cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29—among them Smith v. Allwright (1944), which invalidated Texas’s white primary. Other landmark victories included Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which outlawed racially restrictive real-estate covenants; Sweatt v. Painter (1950), which integrated the University of Texas’s law school; and, of course, Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine.

Marshall had seen segregation firsthand, growing up in Baltimore. His father had worked as a railroad porter and a country-club steward. Soon after graduating first in his class from Howard University’s law school, Marshall marched into the South to represent criminal defendants, soldiers, and laborers in jury trials. He coordinated the NAACP’s national legal strategy in countless lawsuits and hounded the FBI to prevent or respond to racial violence. When he learned of a racist product on the shelf, like Whitman’s Pickaninny Peppermints, Marshall fired off a note to its manufacturer; he answered bigoted newspaper stories with letters to the editor. More than once, he almost got himself killed.


Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to the Court after engineering a vacancy: He appointed Justice Tom Clark’s son Ramsey as U.S. attorney general, creating a conflict of interest that prompted the justice to retire. Haygood overstates the case in saying that Johnson opened up the seat specifically for Marshall, but the president and his solicitor general enjoyed each other’s company. Williams writes, “The two men loved to drink bourbon and tell stories full of lies.” Once nominated, Marshall faced a group of nasty characters in the Senate. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, James Eastland of Mississippi, was a notorious racist whose father had famously lynched a black couple. Eastland himself owned a plantation that employed more than 100 black sharecroppers. His daughter had been crowned Miss Confederacy 1956.


Other old bulls on the committee included John McClellan, Sam Ervin, and Strom Thurmond, a proud bigot who sired a child with a black maid and then paid hush money to his biracial daughter for years. During a notorious cross-examination, Thurmond brought Jim Crow into the hearing room by subjecting Marshall to nothing less than a literacy test, shrilly posing arcane questions (for instance, who were the members of the congressional committee that reviewed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866?). Marshall kept his temper and repeatedly answered, “I don’t know, sir.” Later, Ted Kennedy asked Thurmond whether he could name the committee members. He couldn’t.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/thurgood-marshall-badass/403189/


I highly recommend the book Devil in the Grove : Thurgood Marshall , the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. by Gilbert King . I've read it twice and couldn't put it down either time.