Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers

June 15, 1967

On June 15, 1967, the Los Angeles Sentinel reported that President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall argued over thirty cases before the Supreme Court as the NAACP’s chief council, including the landmark Brown v. Board school segregation case. The Senate confirmed Marshall in late August by a vote of 69 to 11, making him the first African-American justice on the nation’s highest court.

The Sentinel described the fifty-eight-year-old Marshall as a “towering legal genius” and noted that he was the grandson of a slave.  “Essentially, Marshall’s appointment gives Negroes a 1 to 8 representation on the nine-member Supreme Court where in the total national population the ratio is 1 to 10. ‘That,’ remarked one observer, ‘is a pretty good percentage’” (click to view article PDF).

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