Thinkers Timeline

Thurgood Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and the first Black Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He spent his life using the law to dismantle racial segregation in America. He was born Thoroughgood Marshall on 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. He shortened the name to Thurgood at age six because his classmates teased him about it. His father William was a railroad porter; his mother Norma was a school teacher. As a teenager Marshall got into trouble at school. As punishment he was made to read the United States Constitution. The exercise changed his life. He saw clearly the gap between the Constitution's promises of equality and the racist 'Jim Crow' laws that ruled the American South. He wanted to study law at the University of Maryland, the public university of his home state. He was rejected because he was Black. He went instead to Howard University, a historically Black school in Washington, D.C. He graduated first in his class in 1933. His main mentor at Howard was Charles Hamilton Houston, who taught his students that law could be used as a tool for social change. In 1936 Marshall joined the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He became its chief lawyer. From 1940 he led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Over twenty-five years he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29. He won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. President Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1967. He served for 24 years. He retired in 1991 and died on 24 January 1993, aged 84.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and Supreme Court Justice. She is widely seen as one of the most important legal advocates for gender equality in modern history. She was born Joan Ruth Bader on 15 March 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Her family was Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe. They were not wealthy. Her mother Celia died of cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation. She studied at Cornell University, where she met Martin Ginsburg. They married in 1954. The marriage lasted 56 years. Marty Ginsburg was an extraordinary support to her career. He was a tax lawyer, a brilliant cook, and her closest friend. Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of over 500 men. She transferred to Columbia Law School to be with Marty in New York and graduated joint top of her class. Despite her record, she could not find a Supreme Court clerkship. Law firms often refused to hire her. She was, she later said, 'a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot'. She became a law professor at Rutgers, then Columbia. In 1972 she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As its head she argued six cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. President Carter appointed her to a federal appeals court in 1980. President Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993. She served there for 27 years until her death from pancreatic cancer on 18 September 2020, aged 87. She was the second woman ever to serve on the Court.

Harriet McBryde Johnson was an American lawyer, writer, and disability rights activist. She was one of the sharpest writers on disability in English. She was born on 8 July 1957 in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Both her parents were college teachers. She was one of five children. A sister also had the same progressive neuromuscular disease that Harriet herself lived with. The disease affected her muscles throughout her life. From an early age, she used a motorised wheelchair. She needed help with many daily tasks. She was an activist from her teens. As a young student, she tried to get an abusive teacher fired. She later described this as the start of her 'hell-raising'. She studied history at Charleston Southern University, earned a master's degree in public administration, and then a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1985. She lived most of her life in Charleston, South Carolina. As a lawyer, she specialised in helping poor disabled clients claim Social Security benefits. This was quiet, unglamorous work. It kept her close to the realities of disabled lives most people ignored. She was also active in politics, serving as chair of the Charleston County Democratic Party. She described herself, with her usual humour, as 'a disabled, liberal, atheistic Democrat' and as 'a bedpan crip'. She became nationally famous in 2003 when The New York Times Magazine published her essay 'Unspeakable Conversations'. It described her debate the year before with the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that parents should be allowed to kill severely disabled babies. The essay was sharp, funny, and serious. It made her one of the most important voices in American disability thought. She later wrote a memoir, Too Late to Die Young (2005), and a novel for young adults, Accidents of Nature (2006). She died on 4 June 2008, aged 50.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American legal scholar and civil rights lawyer. She is one of the most influential thinkers on race, gender, and the law in the past fifty years. She was born on 5 May 1959 in Canton, Ohio. Her parents were both educated and active in local politics. This family background shaped her strong interest in civil rights from an early age. She studied at Cornell University, where she earned a degree in government and Africana studies in 1981. She then went to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1984. At Harvard she and other students pushed the school to hire more professors of colour and to offer more classes on race and law. She then earned a Master of Laws at the University of Wisconsin in 1985 and worked for a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge. In 1986, at age 27, she joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law. She has taught there ever since. Since 1995, she has also held a position at Columbia Law School in New York. She now splits her time between the two coasts. In a 1989 article, she introduced the word 'intersectionality'. This simple word has spread across universities, courtrooms, and activist movements around the world. She is also one of the founders of critical race theory, a field that studies how law and race shape each other. In 1996 she co-founded the African American Policy Forum. In 2014 she launched the #SayHerName campaign. She is still active today as a scholar, teacher, podcaster, and public speaker.