The Annotated Bobblehead Thurgood Marshall

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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.