This Thurgood Marshall memorial in the Maryland State Capitol’s Lawyer’s Mall/State House Square was unveiled in 1996. It honors the great civil rights leader who became the first African-American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The memorial is erected on the site of the old Court of Appeals building where Marshall argued some of his early civil rights cases.
The text around the base says:
“Thurgood Marshall’s first major victory in his life-long struggle for equality under the law for all Americans took place in the Maryland Court of Appeals which then stood near this memorial. In 1935, Marshall successfully argued for the admission of Donald Murray to the University of Maryland School of Law. This was the first step on the road to Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka in which the United States Supreme Court in 1954 overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” established by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Throughout his life, Thurgood Marshall fought to fulfill the promise held within the quote above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. “Equal Justice Under Law.””
Following Marshall’s death in 1993, the state of Maryland decided to honor Marshall, born in Baltimore, with a memorial at the State House in Annapolis. On May 17, 1994, exactly 40 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka decision, the governor of Maryland signed an Executive Order establishing the Thurgood Marshall Memorial Statue Commission. After a nationwide competition, the Commission awarded the design of the memorial to Maryland artist Antonio Tobias (Toby) Mendez. The Baltimore International Airport (BWI) is also named after Marshall.
