Vivian Marshall
*Vivian 'Buster' Marshall was born on this date in 1911. She was a Black administrator and civil rights activist.
Vivian Burey was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Vivian Burey grew up in a middle-class family; her parents, Christopher and Maud Burey, worked in catering in the city. She attended local schools. She met Thurgood Marshall at age eighteen while she attended the University of Pennsylvania, and he was a student at nearby Lincoln University.
Burey married Thurgood Marshall on September 4, 1929, during Marshall's last year at Lincoln. 1930, they moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a secretary. After her husband completed law school, they moved to New York. Burey had several miscarriages during her 25-year marriage and never had any children. Her husband had some affairs. In the mid-1940s, he founded and served as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Burey Marshall also worked at the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund.
In the 1950s, Burey Marshall was diagnosed with flu or pleurisy but was sick for months. She eventually learned that she had lung cancer. She hid her sickness from her husband for months as he was leading the case of Brown v. Board of Education at the US Supreme Court. After it ruled on May 17, 1954, Marshall told her husband about her illness. Marshall died of lung cancer on February 11, 1955, her 44th birthday. Richard Kluger credits Burey with being one of two people who had been indirectly active but essential influencers of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in his book Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (2011).
Named in her memory, the Vivian Burey Marshall Academy was founded in 2016 as a program of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. It serves students grades 6–10 in the Baltimore, Maryland, and Vicksburg, Mississippi, areas focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning programs.
