R.I.P.

‘Cissy’ Marshall, Justice Thurgood Marshall’s Wife, Dies at 94

Working at the NAACP “opened” her eyes, she once said, and she became an ardent advocate for civil rights alongside her husband, whom she married in 1955.

Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall, a civil rights advocate whose work at the NAACP joined her path with that of her late husband, Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, died on Tuesday, the court announced. She was 94. Marshall was born Cecilia Surat to Filipino immigrants in Hawaii in 1928 and began working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as a young woman. “The clerk, she saw my dark skin, and she sent me to the national office of the NAACP,” Marshall explained in 2016. She said working at the NAACP, where she took notes and prepared legal briefs, “opened [her] eyes” to civil rights issues. It was also where she met her future husband, Thurgood Marshall, who secured the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision as the NAACP’s lead lawyer in 1954. A year later, Marshall’s first wife died, and he “began assiduously courting” Cissy, journalist Wil Haygood wrote. They had two sons before Justice Marshall died in 1993 at 84. In a statement, Justice Elena Kagan called Cissy Marshall “a marvelous woman.”