Thurgood Marshall
His Papers at LC Document a Career in Civil Rights
By LUCY D. SUDDRETH
He has been hailed as a great defender and giant in his quest for human rights. With the acquisition of the Thurgood Marshall papers the Manuscript Division has deeply enriched its 20th century civil rights holdings.
"We initially asked for his papers around 1965," recalled Debra Newman Ham, Afro-American history and culture specialist in the Manuscript Division. "At that time he wrote us back and said that he did not have any papers."
In 1977 a second request was made. This time: no answer. "Then we began to hear rumors that Justice Marshall was planning to destroy his papers and that he was not going to keep them," Dr. Ham continued.
When Marshall announced his retirement in 1991, the Librarian of Congress wrote him again, requesting a meeting to discuss the disposition of his papers. This time, the Librarian received a favorable response for a meeting. Dr. Ham recalled that Mr. Marshall was quite the elder statesman that day and displayed a rollicking humor.
"After a long discussion with Dr. Billington, David Wigdor [assistant chief of the Manuscript Division] and myself about his career and other involvements, he announced that he would give his papers to the Library." The collection was delivered by late fall.
Thurgood Marshall challenged segregationists, championed civil rights and believed until his death that the judicial system was the most effective vehicle for change. He altered the course of a nation and made those who were discriminated against the beneficiaries of their constitutional rights and new opportunities.
When Marshall donated his papers to the Library of Congress in fall 1991 the documentation of his sixty-year career, from civil rights lawyer to Supreme Court Justice, had finally been brought together in one place.
The Thurgood Marshall Collection, arranged by court session and year, contains 150,000 items and spans the years 1949 to 1991, with the bulk of the items ranging from 1961 to 1991. The majority of the papers document Marshall's career as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1961 to 1965; as U.S. solicitor general, 1965 to 1991; and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, 1967 to 1991.
The Supreme Court file constitutes by far the largest part of the collection. This series documents Marshall's 24 years of service on the high court and includes general correspondence, case files, dockets and miscellany. Also included is a significant amount of correspondence pertaining to his retirement. Many of the birthday and retirement letters contain compelling comments about how his service on the court inspired or influenced the lives of the writers.
Some the most significant and frequent of Marshall's correspondents were author Benjamin O. Davis; author and historian John Hope Franklin; Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg; Lyndon B. Johnson; former Rep. Adam Clayton Powell; Roy Wilkins, former director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and columnist Carl T. Rowan, who has recently written a biography of Marshall.
Marshall's tireless efforts to change the injustices towards people of color in the United States through the judicial system is chronicled, not only in his personal papers but also in the notable records of the NAACP, one of the largest collections in the Manuscript Division.
Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, where he attended public school graduating in 1925 from Douglass High School. He completed his undergraduate studies with honors in 1930 from Lincoln University, a historically black institution in Pennsylvania. While at Lincoln he was a member of the varsity debating team for four years, taking part in many interracial and international debates.
It was to his father's credit, however, that Marshall received his bachelor of law degree from Howard University in 1933 and was graduated as valedictorian of his class.
In a 1948 newspaper article, Marshall is quoted as saying, "My father [a writer and yacht-club steward] turned me into a lawyer without once telling me that was what he wanted me to be. He did this by teaching me to argue, by challenging logic on every point, by making me prove every statement -- even if we were only discussing the weather. I only realized later that he was trying to sharpen my mind, to convince me to take nothing for granted."
Although the University of Maryland law school was nearby, segregation barred Marshall from attending, so he commuted to Howard University in Washington, D.C. It was at Howard where he came under the influence of Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, who was regarded by blacks as one of the heroes of their battle for equal rights. After being told by a Supreme Court Justice that "Negroes" often lost court cases, because of inadequate preparation, Dean Houston set out to develop a cadre of civil rights lawyers, which included Thurgood Marshall.
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