Recognizing and Honoring the Legacy of Thurgood Marshall on the Occasion of the Forty-second Anniversary of his Appointment to the United States Supreme Court.

WHEREAS

, Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908, the great-grandson of a slave; and

WHEREAS

, His father, William Marshall, instilled in him at an early age, an appreciation for the U.S. Constitution; and

WHEREAS

, He graduated from the Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore in 1925; and

WHEREAS

, He graduated with honors from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930; and

WHEREAS

, After he was denied admission to the University of Maryland School of Law because of its segregation policies, he attended Howard University where he graduated first in his class in 1933; and

WHEREAS

, He won his first civil rights case in 1936, where he successfully sued the University of Maryland Law School on its segregation policies. There, the Maryland Court of Appeals held that, “Compliance with the Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the state. Whatever, system is adopted for legal education now, must furnish equality of treatment now,”; and

WHEREAS

, Justice Marshall won his first U.S. Supreme Court case in 1940, at the age of 32, and was appointed Chief Counsel for the NAACP that same year; and

WHEREAS

, He went on to prevail in 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, including perhaps his most famous case,

Brown v. Bd. of Education of Topeka

(1954); and

WHEREAS

, He was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961 and was later appointed Solicitor General in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson; and

WHEREAS

, President Johnson appointed Justice Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court as Associate Justice on June 13, 1967, with President Johnson saying that this was the, “right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place,”; and

WHEREAS

, He was the first African-American to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 31, 1967 by a vote of 69 to 11; and

WHEREAS

, Justice Marshall served with distinction on the high Court until 1991; and

WHEREAS

, He passed away from this life on January 24, 1993 at the age of 84; now therefore, be it,

RESOLVED,

That the Philadelphia City Council hereby Recognizes and Honors the Legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Occasion of the Forty-second Anniversary of his Appointment to the United States Supreme Court.

End