To Dismantle the Concept of Separate but Equal, Thurgood Marshall Methodically Devised a Winning Strategy: Divide and Conquer

Thurgood Marshall was feeling confident—or certainly looked like he was. At 37 years old, the attorney and head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund was a rising star who had won two of his first three cases before the U.S. Boisterous and charismatic, he blew into the tiny town of McAlester, Oklahoma, in November 1945 to announce an audacious new plan: He was going to get a Black student enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, the state’s all-white flagship college.

All roads to justice were blocked by Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that legally protected segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. While the court argued that segregated schools were a “valid exercise of ... legislative power,” Americans of all races knew “separate but equal” to be a farce.

Black students were too often shunted to poor, racially isolated schools that offered fewer opportunities than those of their white counterparts. Marshall believed that the best route to dismantling Jim Crow was through the courtroom. But he also understood that an “all-out attack” on segregation, as he often called it, could not be achieved with a single judicial ruling.

The cruel logic of Plessy would have to be chipped away piece by piece, case by case. While the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely remembered for tearing down the “separate but equal” doctrine in schools, that landmark ruling couldn’t have happened without the roster of courageous students who were willing to barrel across the color line in the decades prior.

They were led by an attorney determined to create a more equal world at a time when courts, colleges and even some of his fellow Black leaders deemed it impossible. Lanky, personable and usually armed with a vulgar joke, Marshall had been known as a class clown growing up in Baltimore. Langston Hughes, a classmate during his undergrad years at Lincoln University, described him as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.” He straightened up when he decided to become a lawyer and set his sights on enrolling at the University of Maryland’s law school.

But he was unable to attend because of the color of his skin, an injustice that would motivate much of his career. Need to know: The life of Thurgood Marshall Born Thoroughgood Marshall on June 2, 1908, in Baltimore, the future jurist was known as a cut-up at Frederick Douglass High School. As a punishment for hijinks, a teacher made him sit in a basement room and memorize portions of the U.S.