LaChance, McGinnis, Nguyen

National History Day

January 12, 2015
For a while our group was confused as to what or who we would research for our project.
We considered a lot of topicsand a lot of leaders and legaciesbut none of them seemed to fit
the bill of this years theme. Eventually we came across Thurgood Marshall after going through
our old Civics papers from our past school year and remembered how we were fascinated about
his pioneering work on the Civil Rights Movement. We thought that he was perfect for the theme
of Leadership and Legacy.
When we began our research, we knew immediately that we were going to need a
plethora of sources of all media types. At some times, our group went to local libraries to search
through books about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and Marshalls work on it, and at
others we scoured the Internet for the best pictures and audiovisual sources that we could find.
We even had the luck of being able to contact and interview Diane McWhorter, the author of one
of our most influential sources, A Dream of Freedom, which provided a background history of
the Civil Rights Movement.
To select our category, we took into account both our skills and restrictions. We decided
to work on a group website because it would give us the most creative freedom and it allowed us
to collaborate on it without having to be physically together. Further, we considered the fact that
in a website we would be able to incorporate different types of multimedia that would help us to
express our knowledge and better engage the reader.
Thurgood Marshall came into the Civil Rights Movement at a crucial time. From directly
after the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the hatred and anger of a large portion of the
American population led to the segregation of many public facilities and inferior treatment of
African Americans across the entire nation. When the Reconstruction ended, southern whites
passed a multitude of laws in an effort to deny as much as possible the equality of races. When
Marshall debuted with his groundbreaking case, Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling was the
first of its kind, awakening a nation that had seemed to accept segregation and inequality.
Marshall also went on after this to create the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and changed the
institution of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first African American Supreme Court
Justice. After his leading work, the Civil Rights Movement lit on fire with activists such as Rosa
Parks and the Little Rock Nine. Thurgood Marshall lead not only the beginning of the end of
segregation, but he ignited and preceded the final pull of the Civil Rights Movement. Marshall's
legacy lives on not only in the integrated facilities of the present, but in the silent battle for the
true equality-for-all that America fights every day.