Make 'em bobble!

The Annotated Bobblehead Thurgood Marshall

"Plaintiffs are entitled to a decree enjoining the defendant, William F. Adams, his servants, agents, assistants and employees, and those who might aid, abet, and act in concert withhim, from denying the plaintiffs and others similarly situated the right to enroll in the University of Alabama and pursue courses of study thereat, solely on account of their race and color." Lucy v. Adams, 134 F. Supp. 235 (N.D. Ala.), injunction reinstated , 350 U.S. 1 (1955).

Brown v. Board of Education: Racially segregated schools in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia.

Watts v. Indiana: Coerced confession in Indiana.

Shelley v. Kraemer: Racial covenants in real estate in Michigan and Missouri.

Smith v. Allwright: White primaries in Texas.

Murray v. Pearson: Race discrimination at University of Maryland law school.

"All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any dis[c]rimination or distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, to equal protection of the law." Proposed Draft Bill of Rights, Kenya Const. Conf. (Feb. 2, 1960), in Mary L. Dudziak, Thurgood Marshall's Bill of Rights for Kenya, 11 Green Bag 2d 307 (2008).

Q: Do you have any further impressions of General [Douglas] MacArthur? Do you feel he was definitely biased or just opinionated?
Marshall: He was as biased as any person I've run across.
Q: In other words, he felt basically that blacks were inferior?
Marshall: Inferior. No question about it. . . . I told him about all these instances [of race discrimination in the U.S. Army in Korea and Japan in 1951]. I said, "Well, General, look - you've got all those guards out there with all this spit and polish and there's not one Negro in the whole group." He said, "There's none qualified." I said, "Well, what's qualification?" "In field of battle, et cetera." I said, "Well, I just talked to a Negro yesterday, a sergeant, who has killed more people with a rifle than anybody in history. And he's not qualified?" And he said, "No." I said, "Well, now, General, remember yesterday you had the big band playing at the ceremony over there?" He said, "Yes, wasn't it wonderful?" I said, "Yes. The Headquarters Band, it's beautiful." I said, "Now General, just between you and me, goddamn it, don't you tell me that there's no Negro that can play a horn?" That's when he said for me to go.
Mark Tushnet, ed., Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, etc. 452-53 (2001).

Young Thurgood Marshall

Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908, the son of a railway porter and a teacher. Attending Lincoln College alongside poet Langston Hughes, Marshall became a star of the debating team. Afterwards, Marshall attended Howard University Law School, graduating first in his class in 1933. Marshall went into private practice and joined the NAACP on a number of cases, becoming a staff attorney in 1936. In 1940, he became chief of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which he made a separate entity.

The bobblehead figurine commemorates Marshall's work during his time at the LDF, when he argued a number of important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. These included – as represented on the bobblehead by the books under Marshall's arm – Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948), and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In Smith, a Democratic party policy that permitted exclusively white voters in primaries was overturned, while in Shelley, racially restricted housing covenants were rejected. In a landmark constitutional case, the Supreme Court found in Brown v. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" doctrine was unconstitutional, and ordered states to end racial segregation. Marshall stands on an outline of Kenya, for which he drafted a bill of rights in 1960.