The wife of liberal icon Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights advocate who became the first black Supreme Court justice, has died.
Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall was 94. She passed Tuesday in Falls Church, Virginia, the Washington Post reported.
Wife of Thurgood Marshall dies
Chief Justice John Roberts paid tribute to Cissy Marshall, calling her a “vibrant and engaged member of the Court family.”
“You wanted to sit next to her at any event,” he wrote. “She had an easy sense of humor that could be — in an appropriate setting, of course — a bit saucy,” he said.
Marshall was born Cissy Suyat to Philippine immigrants in Hawaii.
She moved to New York and found work as a secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
There, she met her future husband, a rising civil rights lawyer who represented the NAACP in the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which banned racial segregation in public schooling.
Civil rights advocate
The couple wedded in 1955 after Thurgood Marshall’s first wife died of cancer earlier that year. They had two sons.
Cissy Marshall stayed by her husband’s side as he rose through legal circles, becoming an appellate judge and eventually the first black Supreme Court justice in 1967.
He retired in 1991 and died two years later at 84.
“I remember segregation very well. You couldn’t go to different places,” Cissy Marshall recalled in 2013. “You couldn’t sit in any place. I just wish Thurgood were here… to see his work and the work of his lawyers.”
The NAACP remembered Cissy Marshall as a “staunch advocate for civil rights, who was committed to safeguarding the reputation and legacy of her late husband,” concluding, “Rest in Power.”