Jurist Was on Front Lines in Anti-Segregation Fight : Profile: As a lawyer and judge, the great-grandson of a slave successfully fought legal obstacles to integration.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, who dedicated his life to eradicating the legal obstacles that perpetuated white supremacy, is the only person to serve on the Supreme Court who has experienced the historic divisions of segregated America from the back of the bus.

The great-grandson of a slave and son of a waiter, Marshall grew up in Baltimore at a time when, he later recalled, “there wasn’t a single department store that would let a Negro in the front door.” To attend law school, he had to get up daily at 5 a.m. and commute by train from Baltimore to Washington’s Howard University because Maryland’s schools were segregated.

It was a legacy that Marshall never forgot. And, over the course of his long career as a lawyer and a judge, he probably did as much as anyone else in the history of the United States to counteract that legacy.

“Three hundred and fifty years ago, the Negro was dragged to this country in chains to be sold into slavery,” Marshall wrote in one dissenting opinion 13 years ago. “Uprooted from his homeland and thrust into bondage for forced labor, the slave was deprived of all legal rights. . . . The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment.”

Marshall’s crowning achievement was to serve as the chief lawyer and strategist for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. He went on to combat segregation as a federal appeals court judge, U.S. solicitor general, and, for 24 years, as the Supreme Court’s first and only black justice.

At the Supreme Court and within the exalted confines of Washington’s legal community, Marshall also stood out in ways that had little to do with race. He was one of Washington’s feistiest characters, a man with a booming voice, a love of good stories and a willingness to defy the established powers hour by hour, day by day.

Marshall repeatedly and publicly defied efforts by Republican administrations to goad him to retire. “They will just have to wait,” he once confided to a Times reporter during the Ronald Reagan Administration. “Damned if I’m going to accommodate anyone.”

Virtually every Supreme Court justice seems to represent at least some facets of the President who appointed him. Marshall brought to the court the earthy humor and the strong commitment to civil rights of his political ally and friend, Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he had known since he worked on one of Johnson’s congressional campaigns.

“I always tell lawyers, the best thing you can earn is your reputation, and that takes patience,” Marshall once said. “The worst thing you can earn is a bad name, and that takes hustle.”

On the Supreme Court bench, his white hair tousled and his black robe partially covering his bulky frame, Marshall distinguished himself through his willingness to interject bits of folksy street wisdom into the sometimes remote confines of the Supreme Court.

Once, when a lawyer referred condescendingly to a person involved in an unemployment compensation case as a “janitor,” Marshall shot back, “In our church, we called him a sexton, and you’d better not call him a janitor.”

Another time, a prosecutor tried to persuade the Supreme Court that a female undercover agent placed in a prison cell had not tried to get her cellmate to talk, but had only served as a “listening post.” Can you imagine, Marshall asked, two women being in a cell together for a week and not having conversations?

Marshall told historian Richard Kluger that his great-grandfather was “the baddest niggerin the whole state of Maryland.” He was brought as a slave from Africa to a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and was later set free. Marshall’s grandparents settled in Baltimore, and his father worked as a dining-car waiter and head steward at a private club.

Born in 1908, the justice was originally named Thoroughgood Marshall, after his grandfather. The young boy did not like the name and, apparently, had difficulty spelling it. And so, in the second grade, he changed it to Thurgood Marshall.

Many of Marshall’s memories of his childhood are connected in one way or another with the segregation of the era.

Baltimore’s public school superintendent, he recalled, “didn’t like Negroes. He didn’t like Jews. He didn’t like married women, and he especially didn’t like married women with children. Now, you tell me, who did he like?”

Once, a white friend of Marshall’s father gave the family a charge card to use at a clothing store. When Thurgood went there with his mother to buy a suit, he recalled, “They said all Negro credit cards had been canceled.”

At Lincoln College and Howard Law School, Marshall read avidly the works of black historians and writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson and Langston Hughes.

He started out his legal career in private practice in the midst of the Great Depression, running up a net loss of $1,000 in his first year.

But also, in his first months as a practicing lawyer, Marshall became involved in a civil rights case--a successful effort by the NAACP to require the University of Maryland’s law school to admit a black student.

“They (the University of Maryland) wouldn’t let me go to the law school because I was a Negro, and all through law school, I decided I’d make ‘em pay for it,” Marshall explained. “I decided I’d make ‘em pay for it, and so when I got out and passed the bar, I proceeded to make ‘em pay for it. . . . I enjoyed it no end.”

It was the start of more than three decades of work as a civil rights lawyer, in which Marshall--traveling by train and car, living out of a suitcase and sometimes sleeping wherever he was safe--carried his battles against segregation from small violent towns of the Deep South to the Supreme Court.

It was an era when lynchings were not rare occurrences, when the Ku Klux Klan was powerful and when black men were often said to have been shot in the back while trying to “escape” custody. Marshall learned quickly not only the theory but the hard realities of small-town civil rights law.

In one small Mississippi town, Marshall recalled, “I was out there on the train platform, trying to look small, when this cold-eyed man with a gun on his hip comes up. ‘Nigguh,’ he said, ‘I thought you oughta know the sun ain’t nevah set on a live nigguh in this town.’

“So I wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked ‘em in my hip pocket . . . and caught the next train out of town.”

Marshall worked briefly as an assistant to his law-school mentor Charles Houston at the NAACP’s New York office. In 1938, by the time Marshall was 30, he became the NAACP’s top lawyer, the head of the group’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

For the next 16 years, he directed the organization’s efforts in the courts to overturn Plessy vs. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that upheld “separate but equal” public schools and thus served as the constitutional underpinning for segregation.

Finally, by 1953, the NAACP managed to steer to the court a direct challenge to the Plessy case. At the oral argument, Marshall bluntly told the justices that the only way they could uphold legal segregation was “to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.”

He won. On May 17, 1954, in one of the two or three most famous decisions in American history, the court unanimously ordered an end to legally enforced segregation in the nation’s schools.

The court’s decision was announced by the recently appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren. And it signaled the beginning of the Warren Court era, a 15-year period in which the Supreme Court handed down an astonishing series of landmark decisions extending civil liberties and civil rights.

At the beginning of the John F. Kennedy Administration, Marshall was appointed a federal appeals court judge in New York City. In 1965, Johnson named him U.S. solicitor general, the Justice Department official who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court.

Two years later, Johnson put him on the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring Justice Tom Clark. “I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place,” Johnson told the nation. Southern senators such as John L. McClellan of Arkansas and Sam J. Ervin Jr. of North Carolina tried to challenge Marshall at his nomination hearings, but he was easily confirmed.

“You going to be a hanging judge?” reporters asked him at his swearing-in. “If these photographers get any closer, I will,” Marshall shot back.

In his early years on the court, Marshall was a dependable member of a liberal majority. But in the late 1970s and the 1980s, as newer, more conservative justices joined the court, he found himself increasingly in dissent.

Perhaps his best-known and most ringing individual opinion was his dissent in the first test case on the constitutionality of reverse discrimination, the so-called Bakke case in which a white applicant to UC Davis Medical School claimed he had been denied admission on the basis of his race.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Bakke should be admitted. Marshall was outraged.

“Today’s judgment ignores the fact that for several hundred years, Negroes have been discriminated against, not as individuals, but rather solely because of the color of their skins,” he said. “ . . . At every point from birth to death, the impact of the past is reflected in the still disfavored position of the Negro.”

Marshall’s bitter disagreements with his conservative colleagues rarely carried over to personal relationships or the day-to-day workings of the court. Speaking of current Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Marshall once told a Times reporter: “I like the guy. Don’t agree with him very often, but he’s a great guy.”

But he was not so kind with conservative critics off the court, some of whom called publicly for his retirement.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to outlive those bastards,” he told one judicial conference four years ago.