WIFE OF FIRST BLACK SUPREME COURT JUSTICE
CECILIA MARSHALL • 1928-2022
Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall, a former NAACP legal secretary who safeguarded the reputation and legacy of her late husband, Thurgood Marshall, a towering civil rights lawyer who became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, died Tuesday in Falls Church, Va. She was 94.
The Supreme Court announced her death in a statement but did not cite a cause.
The daughter of Philippine immigrants, Cissy Suyat grew up in Hawaii and arrived after World War II in New York, where she took night classes to become a court stenographer. A clerk at an employment office “saw my dark skin, and she sent me to the national office of the NAACP,” she told The Washington Post years later.
She worked on school desegregation cases for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, typing briefs and taking notes as lawyers rehearsed oral arguments. Her duties also included accompanying Defense Fund officers on trips to the Deep South, where they faced down sometimesmenacing local opposition.
In May 1954, Thurgood Marshall triumphed at the Supreme Court as the NAACP’s lead lawyer in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark ruling that outlawed racial segregation in U.S. public schools. In the ensuing months, he became distraught as his first wife, Vivian “Buster” Burey, succumbed to lung cancer. She died in February 1955.
Soon after, Marshall began courting Suyat. He proposed marriage, but she rebuffed him. “People will think you are marrying a foreigner,” she recalled telling him.
Interracial marriage was an especially sensitive issue then, but Marshall would not be deterred.
“When Thurgood proposed I said, ‘No way,’” she recalled in 2013. She said he insisted: “I’m marrying you. I’m not marrying the country and they’re not marrying me.”
They had two sons, Thurgood Jr. and John. It wasn’t until just before Marshall joined the Supreme Court in 1967 that the justices ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws in 16 states barring interracial marriage could not stand.