Virginia that laws in 16 states barring interracial marriage could not stand.

It wasn’t until just before Marshall joined the Supreme Court that the justices ruled in Loving v. I’m not marrying the country and they’re not marrying me.” “When Thurgood proposed I said, ‘No way,’” she recalled in 2013. She said many people still considered her to be “a foreigner,” and she worried about the reaction. She left the NAACP after they wed.īut the marriage almost didn’t happen, she said, and not because of their 20-year age difference. Marshall’s first wife, Vivien Burey, died of cancer in 1955. And to this day, I thank her, because had it not been for her, I wouldn’t have known anything about a race problem.” “That is the only reason I can think of that she sent me to the NAACP for my first job. “The clerk, she saw my dark skin, and she sent me to the national office of the NAACP,” she said in a 2016 interview. An employment office sent her in 1948 to work at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

She later moved to New York City and took night classes at Columbia University to become a stenographer. He retired from the high court in 1991 and died in 1993 at the age of 84.Ĭecilia Suyat was born in Hawaii on July 20, 1928.

Board of Education case that outlawed segregation in public schools. Marshall’s husband became the high court’s first Black justice in 1967 following a career as a civil rights lawyer in which he argued the landmark Brown v. WASHINGTON (AP) - Cecilia “Cissy” Suyat Marshall, the wife of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who worked alongside the civil rights champion at the NAACP, died Tuesday at the age of 94, the Supreme Court announced.

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