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 Thurgood Marshall Resolution
Resolution #1 - on Thurgood Marshall
(adopted) 13 - - - Submitted by Julian Tait , delegate, and Janet Eberhardt, alternate delegate, on behalf
14 - - - of the Vestry and Clergy of St. Augustine's, DC; the Very Rev. William S. Pregnall, 15 - - - the Rev. John T. Talbott, the Rev. Michael Marrett, the Rev. Martha K. Clark 16 - - - and the Rev. Bruce A. Eberhardt. 17 - - - - - - Resolved, that the One Hundred Eleventh Convention of the Diocese
18 - - - of Washington ask the 2006 General Convention to include Supreme Court Justice] 19 - - - Thurgood Marshall in the book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, and be it further
20 - - - - - - Resolved, that the Convention ask the Bishop of Washington to declare May 17,
21 - - - the date of the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, to be a day to commemorate
22 - - - throughout the Diocese of Washington the Christian witness of Justice Marshall.
Explanation: Thurgood Marshall was the grandson of a freed slave who fought in the Union army and later ran a grocery store in Baltimore , Maryland . His father was a Pullman car porter and worked in a country club whose membership was restricted to whites. Thurgood's mother graduated from college and was a school teacher in the Baltimore school system. Born in Baltimore in 1908, Thurgood attended Baltimore public schools and then attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania . In order to send Thurgood to law school at Howard University in Washington, DC, his mother pawned her engagement and wedding rings.
Thurgood Marshall had wanted to attend law school at the University of Maryland but was denied entrance because he was a Negro. The indignity would not be forgotten. In 1935 Thurgood successfully sued the University, causing it to open its doors to minority students. For a short while following graduation from Howard, Thurgood was in private practice in Baltimore . In 1936 Charles Hamilton Houston, chief counsel for the NAACP, called him to come to New York to be his deputy. Four years later the Legal Defense Fund, dedicated to civil rights advocacy and litigation, appointed Thurgood Marshall as its first director. Thurgood Marshall has been called by many the most important African American of the twentieth century. He spent thirty years crisscrossing the South, filing lawsuits on behalf of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. He was in great physical danger through those tumultuous and triumphant years. On more than one occasion, lynch mobs sought to hang him. In 1954 he headed a team of lawyers and successfully argued the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, overturning centuries of discrimination in education. President Kennedy appointed him to the Federal bench in 1961. In 1965 President Johnson named him Solicitor General and then Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 1967 - he was the first African American to hold either position. Justice Marshall brought incredible change to the social, economic and political structure of the nation. Without regard for his personal safety and with immense energy, he tore down the barriers which had kept generation of African Americans from taking their rightful place in society. Thurgood Marshall was the author of major social changes from which everyone benefits. He died on January 24, 1993.
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