*On this date in 1936, the Maryland Supreme Court ruled against segregation at the University of Maryland Law School.
The case, Murray vs. Pearson, had been attacking the school legally since that summer. It successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray. Represented by Charles Houston of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, his colleague and protégé’ Thurgood Marshall won his major first civil rights case in this ruling.
In winning Murray the right to enter the University of Maryland Law School, Marshall argued eloquently in the case, "What's at stake here is more than the rights of my client. It's the moral commitment stated in our country's creed." Marshall's achievement led him to be, by 1950, one of the country's leading American Civil Rights lawyers, spearheading the movement for Black rights in the South.
Historic U.S. Cases 1690-1993:
An Encyclopedia New York
Copyright 1992 Garland Publishing, New York
ISBN 0-8240-4430-4
