WILLIAM DONALD SCHAEFER, Governor                            J.R. 3

WHEREAS, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was a great legal advocate
and judicial scholar of the civil rights movement in the United States; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Marshall was born and raised in Baltimore and excluded from the
then all white law school at the University of Maryland; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Marshall, undeterred, pursued his dream and in 1933 graduated
first in his law school class at Howard University; and

WHEREAS, As counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
Thurgood Marshall won the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of
Education, and ended the "separate but equal" system of racial segregation then in effect
in the public schools of 21 states; and

WHEREAS, When asked by Justice Felix Frankfurter what he meant by "equal"
during oral argument of Brown, Mr. Marshall replied, "equal means getting the same
thing, at the same time, and in the same place" and coined a definition of equality that
assured African Americans the full rights of citizenship; and

WHEREAS, Thurgood Marshall's legal career spans 6 decades and includes an
appointment by President John F. Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd
Circuit and an appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson to solicitor general of the
United States; and

WHEREAS, In 1967, Thurgood Marshall become the first black justice to sit on the
Supreme Court in its 178-year history; and

WHEREAS, Justice Marshall's record on the Supreme Court was always consistent:
he championed the rights of minorities and the underprivileged, he supported affirmative
action and a women's right to choose, he opposed restrictions on free speech and
government expenditure benefiting religion, and he always opposed the death penalty;
and

WHEREAS, Justice Marshall became the voice of dissent in his later years on the
bench, and in his 1973 dissent in San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, he influenced
the court for years to come by giving greater scrutiny to government decisions and more
broadly reading equal protection guarantees; and

WHEREAS, At his retirement news conference in 1991, Justice Marshall said that
he wished to be remembered with 10 words: "That he did what he could with what he
had"; and

WHEREAS, Inscribed above the entrance to the Supreme Court are the words
"Equal Justice Under Law"; and

WHEREAS, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall lived his life to make these
words a reality for generations of Americans; and

WHEREAS, Thurgood Marshall will be missed by young and old, rich and poor,
black and white, liberal and conservative, Supreme Court colleagues and fellow
Americans; now, therefore, be it

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