Meet Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall

Read this article in the August 20, 2016, Washington Post:

Cissy Marshall recalls day of Brown v. Board of Education decision

Sixty-two years later, Cissy Marshall, now 88, remembers certain details of the day the 9-to-0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education was handed down, as if it happened yesterday.

She was in New York, working at the NAACP’s offices on 43rd Street.

Thurgood Marshall and the legal team that included James M. Nabrit and George Hayes had traveled to Washington on a tip the justices would reveal the ruling. “They were expecting the decision,” she said. “They were getting hints the opinion was coming down. You are not supposed to know anything of these things. But a grapevine gets going.”

Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”