To Dismantle the Concept of Separate but Equal, Thurgood Marshall Methodically Devised a Winning Strategy: Divide and Conquer

While other activists aimed to take down Jim Crow in one fell swoop, the future Supreme Court justice compiled a series of wins that ultimately added up to an undeniable resolution

Victor Luckerson

Illustration by Hsiao-Ron Cheng

September/October 2026

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Thurgood Marshall was feeling confident—or certainly looked like he was. At 37 years old, the attorney and head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund was a rising star who had won two of his first three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boisterous and charismatic, he blew into the tiny town of McAlester, Oklahoma, in November 1945 to announce an audacious new plan: He was going to get a Black student enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, the state’s all-white flagship college. “This is the easiest case to beat that ever entered the courts of Oklahoma,” Marshall boasted before a crowd of local NAACP delegates. “I could win this type of case even down in Mississippi.” 

The NAACP had tried and failed to take on Jim Crow segregation in education before. All roads to justice were blocked by Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that legally protected segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. While the court argued that segregated schools were a “valid exercise of ... legislative power,” Americans of all races knew “separate but equal” to be a farce. Black students were too often shunted to poor, racially isolated schools that offered fewer opportunities than those of their white counterparts. 

Marshall believed that the best route to dismantling Jim Crow was through the courtroom. But he also understood that an “all-out attack” on segregation, as he often called it, could not be achieved with a single judicial ruling. The cruel logic of Plessy would have to be chipped away piece by piece, case by case. While the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely remembered for tearing down the “separate but equal” doctrine in schools, that landmark ruling couldn’t have happened without the roster of courageous students who were willing to barrel across the color line in the decades prior. They were led by an attorney determined to create a more equal world at a time when courts, colleges and even some of his fellow Black leaders deemed it impossible. “You just simply cannot have a little segregation,” Marshall once remarked. “You cannot rationalize on the necessity of segregation at all.” 

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For Marshall, the desire to destroy Jim Crow wasn’t just a professional calling; it was personal. Lanky, personable and usually armed with a vulgar joke, Marshall had been known as a class clown growing up in Baltimore. Langston Hughes, a classmate during his undergrad years at Lincoln University, described him as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.” He straightened up when he decided to become a lawyer and set his sights on enrolling at the University of Maryland’s law school. But he was unable to attend because of the color of his skin, an injustice that would motivate much of his career. 

In 1930, he begrudgingly enrolled at Howard University, which had a small, struggling law school at the time. The decision would prove transformative. At Howard, Marshall encountered Charles Houston, the stern new dean of the law school and later an
attorney for the NAACP. Houston instilled a sense of purpose in his young students, predicting that the Black lawyers of Marshall’s generation would become the social engineers of a new America. 

After Marshall graduated at the top of his class, an impressed Houston recruited him to help with legal work for the NAACP. The organization wanted to improve Black schools but was still casting about for the best way to do so. Initially, in the 1920s, the civil rights group laid out a plan to file a barrage of targeted lawsuits to increase funding for Black schools on a case-by-case basis. In 1931, NAACP attorney Nathan Margold argued that the organization should challenge the constitutionality of segregation directly by exposing the widespread inequality between white schools and Black ones. 

When Houston became the NAACP’s lead attorney, he made a savvy revision to Margold’s strategy: Instead of targeting elementary and high schools, he would look for inequities in higher education. Using legal pressure, the NAACP could force states to either build expensive “separate but equal” professional schools for Black students or admit them into white schools. Any Black-only facilities that failed to live up to an equal standard would only bolster the argument that African Americans were being denied their basic rights. 

The early years pursuing the strategy led to misfires. In 1938, Houston and Marshall successfully argued before the Supreme Court that a Black student named Lloyd Gaines deserved a spot at the University of Missouri’s law school. Yet just before classes began, Gaines disappeared mysteriously, embarrassing the NAACP. The weight of breaking the color barrier may have simply been too much for the young man; his last known correspondence was a letter to his mother lamenting the pressures he faced fighting for the “lasting success for 13 million Negroes.”

Houston soon retired, and Marshall became the head of the NAACP’s new Legal Defense Fund. His team scoured the South for suitable candidates who could apply to professional schools—and who, if they became plaintiffs, wouldn’t disappear. In 1945 they found an ideal person in Ada Lois Sipuel, a 21-year-old college graduate and aspiring lawyer from Oklahoma. Sipuel’s parents had escaped Tulsa after the race massacre of 1921, when a white mob burned down the Black neighborhood of Greenwood. She was more than familiar with racial hatred, and she seized the opportunity when the NAACP recruited her to challenge discrimination at the University of Oklahoma. “The law was wrong,” she said later of her reasoning. “The whole system was unfair.” 

In January 1946, Sipuel applied to the University of Oklahoma’s law school and was denied because of her race. Marshall and the NAACP quickly filed suit, and within two years the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Although in earlier education cases the NAACP had mostly stuck to arguing that Black students deserved equal facilities, this time Marshall attacked Plessy directly. He declared that the “separate but equal” doctrine was “without legal foundation.” The Supreme Court ruled in Sipuel’s favor, but the decision pointedly sidestepped the question of whether “separate but equal” was constitutional. The court would allow only that Sipuel deserved a law school education, however the University of Oklahoma might see fit to create it. Seizing on this vague directive, state officials hastily established a sham Black law school located in a few spare rooms in the state capitol. Sipuel, insulted, refused to enroll. 

Other high-profile cases that Marshall pursued at the same time hit similar roadblocks. The same month of the Sipuel decision, a professor named George McLaurin applied to attend the University of Oklahoma’s graduate school and was denied. Following a lawsuit, he was admitted with reluctance, but the school assigned him a desk in a separate alcove from white students and banned him from eating lunch with his classmates. In Texas, a 33-year-old mailman named Heman Sweatt filed suit to enroll at the University of Texas law school. The state’s attorney general declared that Sweatt would never “darken the doors” of the university, and college officials set him up in a separate, charade law school similar to Sipuel’s at Oklahoma.

Marshall realized that these colleges would not budge from “separate but equal,” even if it meant spending new money on Black facilities. He would have to push his argument further. So, in April of 1950, he and his NAACP colleagues argued a pair of appeals in the Sweatt and McLaurin cases before the Supreme Court. They emphasized that forced segregation was a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, regardless of the quality of segregated facilities being provided to Black students. “The very fact of segregation establishes a feeling of humiliation and deprivation to the group considered to be inferior,” Marshall’s team argued in their legal brief. Or, as the lawyer himself said in simpler terms during the hearing, “They can build an exact duplicate [of the law school], but if it is segregated, it is unequal.” An onlooker said it was one of Marshall’s most persuasive presentations before the court. 

On June 5, the Supreme Court offered its decision. The segregation policies that had kept McLaurin and Sweatt separate from their white classmates would have to be abolished. But the court again sidestepped the thrust of the NAACP’s argument: that Plessy v. Ferguson and the “separate but equal” doctrine itself was unconstitutional. “Broader issues have been urged for our consideration,” Chief Justice Fred Vinson wrote in his opinion, “but we adhere to the principle of deciding constitutional questions only in the context of the particular case before the court.”

The legal victories were widely celebrated in the Black press and at NAACP headquarters—“there was lots of Scotch and bourbon,” one attorney recalled—but there was also worry from some Black leaders about the narrow scope of the ruling. “I know you would have preferred a clear-cut overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson,” a friend of Marshall’s wrote to him consolingly in a private letter. 

But Marshall didn’t think the window of opportunity was closing; far from it. “A careful reading of the opinions will show that for all intents and purposes, Plessy v. Ferguson has been gutted,” he responded. “Whatever way you look at it, the end is in sight.”

Marshall was right. In 1951, around eight months after the Sweatt and McLaurin rulings, a Kansas welder named Oliver Brown filed a class-action lawsuit against the Topeka school board on behalf of his third-grade daughter, Linda, who had been denied access to a nearby white elementary school. By the time Brown v. Board of Education made its way to the Supreme Court in 1952, Marshall had sharpened the arguments he’d first introduced in previous higher-education cases, particularly around the negative psychological effects of segregation on students. When Chief Justice Earl Warren issued his landmark 1954 opinion, he cited several of Marshall’s previous cases as relevant precedent: Gaines, Sipuel, Sweatt and McLaurin. The combined weight of those cases, of the lost opportunity these Black students had suffered, was finally enough to force the court to reverse its historic mistake. “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” Warren’s opinion read.

The Brown v. Board decision was seismic, but it wasn’t sudden. The courts slowly ceded ground in each successive decision. And the courageous students never let up, throwing a wrench into the dehumanizing machinery of Jim Crow every chance they got. Progress is often slow and incremental, until it happens all at once. 

Victor Luckerson is the national correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine. He is the author of Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He also runs an email newsletter about neglected Black history called Run It Back.

Hsiao-Ron Cheng  is an illustrator captivated by the aesthetics of botanical science.