The Work
Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) - NAACP chief counsel, lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the first African-American Supreme Court Justice - represents the point at which the biblical anthropology of the Black church tradition entered American constitutional jurisprudence at the highest level. The legal arguments Marshall made before the Supreme Court drew on a theological tradition of human dignity rooted in Genesis 1:27 and Acts 17:26, mediated through decades of Black church preaching and social gospel theology.
Biblical Engagement
The foundational biblical text is Genesis 1:27: "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." The imago Dei - the image of God in every human person - has been the theological premise of Christian arguments for human equality since the early church, but it achieved particular force and urgency in the African-American tradition because it was deployed against a social order that denied its implications.
Acts 17:26 - Paul's speech at the Areopagus: "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth" - provided a specific anti-racist argument: all human beings share a single origin, a single creator, a single nature. The argument Paul makes to a Greek audience skeptical of Jewish particularism is the same argument that African-American theologians made to a white American audience committed to racial hierarchy: there is one human family, one common nature, one source of human dignity.
Galatians 3:28 - "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" - was cited by Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and countless other figures in the abolitionist and civil rights traditions as the Pauline demolition of the theological rationale for racial hierarchy.
Themes
Marshall's legal strategy in Brown v. Board of Education did not explicitly invoke the Bible; constitutional litigation requires constitutional argument. But the moral framework that gave the legal argument its force - the intuition that racial segregation violated an inviolable human dignity that preceded and grounded constitutional law - was formed in the Black church tradition that Marshall knew from childhood in Baltimore. The imago Dei provided the premise that the legal argument articulated in the language of equal protection.
Sociologist Kenneth Clark's "doll tests" - which showed that Black children in segregated schools exhibited self-denigration in preference tests - provided Marshall with empirical evidence that segregation caused "a sense of inferiority" destructive to the children's development. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown cited Clark's findings explicitly. The theological claim (every person bears the image of God and therefore has irreducible dignity) was operationalized through social science (segregation damages the dignity of children who are treated as inferior). The biblical and the empirical made the same argument by different methods.
Legacy
Marshall's success in Brown made him the most consequential civil rights lawyer of the 20th century before he became the most consequential civil rights judge. His jurisprudence on the Supreme Court consistently reflected his conviction that the Constitution's equal protection guarantee was not merely a legal formula but a moral commitment whose content was shaped by the entire tradition of human dignity reaching back to the biblical declaration that every person is made in the image of God.
The Black church's role in the civil rights movement - from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the March on Washington - was not merely organizational. It was theological: the movement drew on the resources of a tradition that had maintained, against every social pressure, that the people being oppressed were made in the image of God and that this fact had legal and political implications. Marshall embodied the point where that theological conviction achieved its constitutional expression.