Thurgood Marshall Dbq

The content is valuable to some extent. Haugen infers that “by 1950….Marshall was considered the top civil rights expert in the nation.” This is a strength because Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American to be chosen as a member of the Supreme Court. Marshall held stubbornly to his beliefs of a desegregated United States. Therefore, he worked hard to bring freedom and equality to all kinds of different people, including blacks, women, and the mentally ill. Due to this, Marshall has received lots of praise from people, in particular, the Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who clerked for Marshall. She called him "the greatest lawyer of the 20th century." This shows that he was well respected even though he was an African-American man. Another strength of Haugen’s perspective is that some believed without Thurgood Marshall there wouldn’t have been an advancement for African Americans. For example, the executive director of the NAACP agreed that “….without Thurgood Marshall, we would still be riding in the back of the bus, going to separate schools and drinking ‘coloured’ water.” However, a limitation is that there some opposition to Marshall’s …show more content…
Tony McCulloch, a professor in the History department at Canterbury Christ Church University supports Haugen’s view and claims that the Supreme Court played a major part in the history of black civil rights because of its role as the interpreter of the US constitution. Its decision defined what governments can and cannot do. This meant that without the Supreme Court’s laws, African Americans would not have advanced their civil rights. Her perspective is further supported by James T. Patterson as he argued that, “Without Brown, the civil rights movement would not have been quite the same.” This was because the decision gave a new dimension to the civil rights movement and so by the end of 1957, 723 school districts in the South had desegregated their

Show More

Related Documents: Thurgood Marshall Dbq

Course: US History From 1877 To The Present