is adopted for legal education must furnish equality of treatment now”. This meant that no matter the circumstance, desegregation on a wide scale was not necessary, rather equality in provision in schools was required by the state.
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950).
HISTORICALLY INFLUENTIAL LAWYER: Thrugood Marshall Tom Oakland
Born on July 2nd, 1908, Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer and civil rights activist. He was born in Baltimore and graduated from the Howard University School of Law in 1933. Initially, he had his own legal practice in Baltimore before founding the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund. During this, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, the most poignant of which being on racial segregation within public education. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as the US Solicitor General, before promoting him to being an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1967. Marshall’s most notable cases
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. This was a unanimous decision in favour of desegregation. The case had started in 1851 in which the public school district would not enrol the daughter of a black man called Oliver Brown into a local school. Rather, she was ordered to go to a black elementary school further away from their home. However, this case was not one that went well for Marshall. Even though throughout his tenure as a lawyer, he had won 29 of 32 cases, the Brown Case did not go as he wanted. It was ruled that “whatever system
Once more, Marshall was arguing for desegregation with regards to education. Marshall argued to the Supreme Court that a public institution of higher learning could not provide alternate treatment to students simply based upon their race, as doing so was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment: rights of Equal Protection. This case took only a month to decide and was won convincingly. What then ensued was the University admitted McLaurin but provided him with separate facilities such as a special table, designated desk, and sometimes separate eating times. In commemoration of this decision, in 2001 the Bizzell Memorial Library at the University of Oklahoma was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark.
Sweatt v. Painter (1950). In this case, the concept of “separate but equal” as a segregationist stance was challenged (in the footsteps of the Plessy v. Ferguson case ,1896). The court sided with Sweatt, a black man who was denied the ability to attend the University of Texas School of Law due to his race. In 2017, “Marshall”, which was a biographical drama recounting the first cases of Thurgood Marshall’s career, was released. The actor Chadwick Boseman played Marshall and brought his name back in to notoriety. The largest, longest-standing effect of Marshall’s life was that of his legacy and push for equality which changed the manner in which the whole U.S. Justice system acted towards race and segregation. He was a liberal member of the conservativedominated Supreme Court who made sure to stress the importance of just treatment of the country’s minorities. He was pragmatic and judicial, trying to ensure equal opportunity for those who lived in America.
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