Lawyer Confer: three lawyers confer at the Supreme Court before presenting arguments against segregated schools in Virginia and South Carolina. Left to right: Harold P. Boulware of Columbia, South Carolina; Thurgood Marshall of New York City, who represents the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and Spottswood W. Robinson III of Richmond, Virginia. They hope to win a decision that segregation of black and white students in public schools violates the Constitution, Washington DC.

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) was an American lawyer and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's 96th Justice and its first black Justice. Marshall established a private legal practice in Baltimore before founding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he served as Executive Director. In that position, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Brown v. Board of Education, which held that racial segregation in public education is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as the United States Solicitor General. In 1967, Johnson successfully nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court to succeed retiring Associate Justice Tom C. Clark.

On recto: typewritten title and date.
On verso: typewritten title and date stamp.

Wire photographs were originally transmitted over phonelines, then later, by satellite. They were first used in the early 1920s. Associated Press became a leader with this. After pigment touch-ups, etc., the print is put into a drum (like a drum scanner). The image gets converted into audio tones that are transmitted. The tones are received and beamed onto photo-sensitive paper. Wire photographs are copies without originals---they are hybrid, transmitted objects. (Britt Salvesen, Curator and Department Head, Photography Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 30-31, 2022)

This object has the following keywords:

• Broken barriers
• Civil Rights Movements
• Desegregation
• Education
• Harold Boulware
• Injustice
• Lawsuits
• Male Portraits
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• Racial Discrimination
• Schools
• South Carolina
• Thurgood Marshall
• Thurgood Marshall
• United States Supreme Court
• Virginia

• Image Dimensions: 6 9/16 x 9 1/8 in. (16.67 x 23.18 cm) Measured by Cornejo-Reynoso, Aitzin
• Sheet Dimensions: 6 15/16 x 9 9/16 in. (17.62 x 24.29 cm) Measured by Cornejo-Reynoso, Aitzin