Thinkers Timeline

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) was an American jurist, legal philosopher, and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into one of the most distinguished intellectual families in America — his father was the poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. He was educated at Harvard and served in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he was wounded three times, experiences that left him with a lifelong sense of the fragility of certainties and the cost of ideology. He practised law, taught at Harvard Law School, served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, where he served for nearly thirty years until retiring in 1932 at the age of ninety. He was one of the most influential jurists in American history. His major works include The Common Law (1881), in which he argued that the life of the law has not been logic but experience, and hundreds of opinions on the Supreme Court, including celebrated dissents in free speech cases that shaped twentieth-century First Amendment jurisprudence.

Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin was a Haitian lawyer, politician, and pioneering anthropologist. He may be the first Black anthropologist in history. He was born on 18 October 1850 in Cap-Haïtien, in the north of Haiti, to a working-class family. Haiti had been independent for only 46 years. The country was still recovering from the revolution and from the huge payments France had demanded for recognising its freedom. Firmin was a brilliant student. He taught himself Greek, Latin, and French, which he later taught to others. He studied law and became a lawyer by 1875. He was active in liberal politics. He founded a newspaper, Le Messager du Nord, which supported reform. Political turmoil pushed him into government service and then abroad. In 1883, he was appointed Haitian ambassador to France and moved to Paris. While in Paris, a French doctor invited him to join the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, the leading anthropology society of its day. He attended meetings regularly. But the society was dominated by racist 'scientific' theories that claimed white people were superior. Firmin sat through meeting after meeting, knowing the other members saw him as inferior. He tried to speak only twice. Both times he was cut off or insulted. So he wrote a book instead. De l'égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races) appeared in 1885. It was 662 pages long and had taken him eighteen months to write. It systematically destroyed the racist anthropology of his time. It was almost completely ignored. Firmin returned to Haiti and had a difficult political career. He served as foreign minister, ran for president twice, and led two failed revolts. He died in exile on the island of St. Thomas on 19 September 1911, aged 60. His book was only rediscovered and translated into English in 2000, 115 years after it was written.

B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and philosopher. His full name was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He was born into a Dalit family, the community then called Untouchables, who occupied the lowest position in India's caste hierarchy and were subjected to severe discrimination, exclusion, and violence. Despite the enormous obstacles placed in front of him by the caste system, Ambedkar became one of the most educated people in India of his generation, earning doctorates from Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics. He spent his life fighting against caste as a system of oppression and arguing for the full rights and dignity of Dalit people. He was the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, which he designed to protect the rights of all citizens and to prohibit caste discrimination. In the last year of his life, he converted to Buddhism along with hundreds of thousands of his followers, an act he understood as both a spiritual choice and a rejection of the Hindu caste system. He died in 1956, just weeks after completing his final manuscript.

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.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African lawyer, freedom fighter, and statesman. He led the long struggle to end apartheid, the racist system that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. He was born on 18 July 1918 in Mvezo, a small village in the Eastern Cape. He was given the name Rolihlahla, which in Xhosa roughly means 'pulling the branch of a tree' or, informally, 'troublemaker'. A teacher gave him the English name Nelson when he started school. He came from a Thembu royal family. His father died when Nelson was nine, and he was raised at the royal court. He trained as a lawyer in Johannesburg. With his friend Oliver Tambo, he opened the first Black law firm in South Africa in 1952. Black South Africans had almost no rights under apartheid. They could not vote, were forced to live in poor 'townships', and had to carry passes to enter white areas. Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943. He helped lead peaceful campaigns through the 1950s. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when police killed 69 unarmed Black protesters, he changed his mind about non-violence. In 1961 he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC. He was arrested in 1962 and put on trial for sabotage. In 1964 he was sentenced to life in prison. He served 27 years, mostly on Robben Island. He was released on 11 February 1990. He led the negotiations that ended apartheid. He became South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994. He died on 5 December 2013, aged 95.

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.