The Roundtable's three-part serial on the 2010 Black History Month concludes today with a discussion of the crucial role played by Thurgood Marshall in the American civil rights movement. Born in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall attended Lincoln University in the state of Pennsylvania - the same institution celebrated as "the first tertiary institution solely founded anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for youth of African descent." Proof of that can be found in some of its most illustrious alumni: Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, K.O. Mbadiwe and R.B.K. Okafor, among others.

Upon graduating from Lincoln, Marshall decided on a career as an attorney-at-law. He dispensed with applying to the whites-only University of Maryland law school because it was then easier for a camel to pass through the needle's eye than for a brilliant young black student to enter a school like UM. He applied instead to the historically black Howard University law school in Washington, D.C. His doting mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to pay his tuition fees (thank God for mothers!). Marshall excelled in his studies at Howard, graduating top of his class in 1933. The head of the law school, Charles Hamilton Houston, quickly brought the prodigious Marshall under his wing. It was the beginning of a relationship that was to radically transform the state of litigated civil rights in America.

Marshall succeeded Charles Houston in 1938 as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) legal committee. In 1940, he became the first chief of the newly established NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Marshall was very personable. Here is what the influential United Press International (UPI) had to say of at a point in time: "Thurgood Marshall was an outstanding tactician with exceptional attention to detail, a tenacious ability to focus on a goal and possessing a deep voice that often was termed the loudest in the room. He also possessed a charm so extraordinary that even the most intransigent southern segregationist sheriff (an elected police officer responsible for maintaining law and order in a U.S. city or local government/county) could not resist his stories and jokes."

This highly potent combination of good charms and skills easily distinguished him in his legal practice. Despite being very assertive, he never experienced the white backlash that befell other crusading "strong-minded" black lawyers in the Deep South. Secondly, he was able to achieve the then unthinkable thing of persuading an all-white jury - in Jim Crow South! - to acquit 25 blacks of a rioting charge at a time when mere speculation was sufficient to get a Negro hung from a tree! It was under Thurgood Marshall that the Charles H. Houston-devised gradualist strategy matured with an epochal victory in the "case of the 20th Century": Brown v Board of Education (1954). Some background historical information is necessary. At a time during the American civil war, President Abe Lincoln concluded that freeing the black slaves would deal a lethal blow to the economy and war effort of the confederacy. Consequently, on January 1, 1863, he promulgated the "Great Emancipation Proclamation," which declared all slaves in rebellious southern states "henceforward and forever free."

As a precondition for regaining their congressional representation, the defeated confederate (southern) states were required to ratify the 12th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. These three amendments - known as "Reconstruction Amendments" and championed by Frederick Douglass, the leading African-American figure of the 19th Century - abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens , and barred all forms of voting discrimination on the basis of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The Reconstruction era witnessed the election of several blacks into the U.S. Congress and the founding of many successful black-owned businesses. But the need by politicians to forge broad-based winning alliances soon culminated in a situation where white northern political figures were becoming increasingly less willing to battle the resistance of their southern counterparts to racial equality.

This political expediency quickly eroded virtually all the civil rights gains made by blacks. The courts too became a willing tool in this despicable project as they seized upon technicalities and loopholes to avoid striking down segregationist laws. For example, Congress enacted a law in 1875 that barred "any person" from depriving citizens of any race or color of equal treatment in public accommodations and public transportation. But the Supreme Court declared the law illegal in 1883 on the basis that the 14th Amendment prohibited discrimination by states and not individuals! Perhaps, the Supreme Court ruling that contributed the most in rolling back the gains of racial equality was the 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision.

Homer Plessy, a white man who had the 'misfortune' of having a black great grandmother (by law 'quadroons' were classified as Negroes) bought a ticket for a whites-only rail car. He had no difficulty purchasing the ticket given his faultlessly white skin. But after boarding the rail car, he confessed his ancestry to the conductor. He was promptly arrested and charged to court. In a 7-1 decision, the apex court upheld Louisiana's segregation law insisting that "The enforced segregation of the two races did not stamp the colored race with a badge of inferiority." This was the genesis of the separate-but-equal doctrine. The Plessy declaration paved the way for a rash of Jim Crow laws in the South legislating separate public schools, railroad cars, public libraries, restaurants, hotels as well as water fountains and toilets.

However, the dissenting judgment written by Justice John Marshall Harlan held that "In the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens...In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law." It was not until 1954 - in the Brown v Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) case - that Harlan's view finally prevailed, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and unanimously over-ruled Plessy by declaring that "...in the field of public education the doctrine of separate-but-equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated...are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment." It was an open admission that something was drastically wrong with the American system that required to be urgently remedied and credit for the breadth-taking legal victory deservedly went to Thurgood Marshall. He won an outstanding 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court and came to be respectfully acclaimed as "Mr. Civil Rights."

Marshall was appointed a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy. Five years later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed him the first African-American Supreme Court justice. His fellow Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell, eloquently testified that "No other American did more to lead our country out of the wilderness of segregation than Thurgood Marshall."