The Courtroom Gladiator Who ‘Made America America’

The upcoming 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States of America is a time to reflect on the founding of our country, which was heralded by a novel Declaration of Independence that proclaimed “all men are created equal”—but was primarily written by a slave holder. An honest appraisal of our history reveals there has been a wide gap between the reality of the United States and the ideals toward which the country has aspired. According to author and academic Wil Haygood, Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice, is one of the key individuals who has tried to close that gap by moving us closer to our lofty original aspirations. Haygood says that in doing so, this battling barrister “made America America.”

Haygood, who wrote a book about Marshall in 2015, is one of the interview subjects in the new PBS documentary about Marshall, Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect. The film is co-executive produced by nonfiction filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who won two Emmy Awards for 2010’s Freedom Riders and was Emmy-nominated for 2015’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard for the Revolution, as well as Oscar-nominated for 2021’s Attica.

Becoming Thurgood is a conventionally-told nonfiction story about an unconventional individual who challenged and changed America. The documentary uses tried and true techniques, including archival footage in both color and black and white that’s intercut with a 1977 interview with Marshall, as well as animation by Reginald William Butler. In addition to Haygood—who is also the Boadway Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence for the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Ohio—the interviewees include Marshall’s son, former U.S. Marshal John Marshall; granddaughter Cecilia Marshall, who is on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund’s Board of Directors; and Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). 

Directed by Emmy and Peabody Award winner Alexis Aggrey, Becoming Thurgood relates the origin story of the famed Justice, revealing who and what shaped him. The documentary takes us through Marshall’s years as a “boy wonder” who won court case after court case against white supremacy, culminating in his appointment as the first Black Justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. As Haygood notes in the film, “legally speaking, he’s one of our founding fathers.”

According to Becoming Thurgood, Marshall was born in 1908 in Baltimore, and grew up about five miles from the Mason-Dixon Line at a time when the city was still segregated. Both of Marshall’s grandfathers were grocers who would feed poor Black neighbors, and from a young age, Marshall was inculcated with a commitment to serve and uplift. He attended Pennsylvania’s mostly-Black Lincoln University at the same time as the poet Langston Hughes.

In 1930 Marshall went to the famed HBCU Howard University, where he studied under Harvard Law School graduate Charles Hamilton Houston, the dean of Howard University Law School. Houston is described in the film as a “race man” and “perfectionist” who “wanted law used to advance the race” and had “an agitator’s creed.” Houston was monikered “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow,” and under his mentorship, Marshall graduated in 1933 as valedictorian of his class.    

Marshall returned to Baltimore to practice law, but soon relocated to New York City to join Houston, who’d become the NAACP’s first special counsel. Believing that the intent of the U.S. Constitution was fairness for all, they launched a courtroom crusade to upend the legal precedents that were the undergirding of American-style apartheid, including the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling that the U.S. Constitution did not extend U.S. citizenship to African Americans, and the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision which established “separate but equal” accommodations. By 1940 Marshall founded NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and was LDF’s first director-counsel.

Marshall’s expertise and oratory as a courtroom gladiator in the fight to end segregation and lynching earned him the nickname “Mister Civil Rights” and celebrity status. According to the film, when Black Americans heard Marshall was going to argue a case at a nearby courthouse, they flocked there to see the spectacle in action. But African Americans weren’t the only ones taking notice of Marshall and his successful legal track record. In the documentary, author Gilbert King relates that the Ku Klux Klan was also keeping its eyes on the litigator, who was almost lynched in Tennessee in 1946.

Marshall survived the attempt and went on to deliver the courthouse knockout blow to segregation as NAACP’s chief counsel in the 1954 groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education decision, wherein the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the “separate but equal” doctrine in public schools, and by implication, in American society at large. Although the legal precedent for equality had been set, it wasn’t all smooth sailing afterwards. President Dwight Eisenhower had to send U.S. Army troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to enforce the desegregation of Arkansas’s public schools in September 1957. Onscreen, Marshall confesses that “Little Rock was rough.”

President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him U.S. Solicitor General, and in 1967 Johnson appointed Marshall to become the first Black Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. As historic as this was, Haygood points out in the documentary that Marshall was perhaps the only high court Justice who was “more famous for what he did before [he sat on] the Supreme Court.”

Thurgood Marshall is a character worthy of a drama by a great playwright, and to be sure, he has been dramatized onstage by James Earl Jones and then by Laurence Fishburne in 2006’s Thurgood, which opened on Broadway in 2008 and was later adapted into a made-for-television film in 2011. In 2017 Chadwick Boseman played the title role in Reginald Hudlin’s feature film Marshall. But this new exciting hour-long documentary, Becoming Thurgood, also captures the nobility and courage of the legal titan who fought through the law to extend the promise of American equality in order to ensure that when Thomas Jefferson wrote “all” in the Declaration of Independence, it meant “all.”  

Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect premieres Tuesday, September 9, 2025, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org, and the PBS app.