On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the first African American to sit on it. He was 59. He had spent 25 years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had argued 32 cases before this same court and won 29 of them, including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and had been solicitor general since 1965.
He had been confirmed by the Senate on August 30 by 69 votes to 11. Southern Democrats opposed him. The hearing had run for six hours over two days, largely taken up with Marshall refusing to answer hypothetical questions, and Strom Thurmond had questioned him about disputed points of eighteenth-century legal history. Marshall had already been a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for four years.
What he brought to the bench was a litigator's sense of what a ruling does on the ground. He had built Brown partly on the Doll Test, the experiment by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in which black children in segregated schools chose white dolls over black ones, and he had argued it as a fact about measurable harm rather than as constitutional theory. The court's unanimous opinion accepted it.
On the bench he wrote for the majority in cases extending the exclusionary rule, striking down the death penalty as then applied in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, and supporting affirmative action in Bakke in 1978. He dissented far more often after 1972 as the court moved right, and his dissents in capital cases in the 1980s and 1990s are the most quoted things he wrote. He called the court's handling of death penalty appeals a machinery of death.
He retired in June 1991. He was the last justice of the Warren court era to leave, and Clarence Thomas, whose politics were almost entirely opposite, took the seat. Marshall said he had served 24 years and had lasted as long as he could. He died in January 1993 and is buried at Arlington.