Murray v. Maryland, 169 Md. 478 [Segregation]
1937, Baltimore, Maryland
Court Opinion Delivered by: Case not appealed to the Supreme Court
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Thurgood Marshall
Attorney for the Defendant:
Charles Hamilton Houston, general legal counsel to the NAACP, developed a plan to build a string of precedents against Plessy during the height of the Great Depression. The first victory in this plan was argued in 1935 before the Baltimore City Court. It involved the University of Maryland School of Law, the same institution that had refused to admit NAACP legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, several years before. The case revolved around the situation of Donald Murray, a 1934 graduate of Amherst College, sporting a stellar college record. Had he been white, Murray would have been admitted with no fanfare. The university president based his rejection of Murray’s application on a state policy requiring black students to accept one of three options: attend Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or out-of-state institutions. Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Murray, showing that neither of the in-state institutions offered a law school. He further proved the segregated in-state schools flagrantly unequal to the facilities offered at the University of Maryland and other out-of-state black schools. The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned Murray’s rejected application with this statement: “Compliance with the Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the state. Whatever system is adopted for legal education now must furnish equality of treatment now”. Because the state did not appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, the Murray case did not establish any precedent on racial segregation outside Maryland.

Mills v. Board of Education of Anne Arundel County, 30 F. Supp. 245 [Segregation]
1939, Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Court Opinion Delivered by: Case appeared before the federal district court and was not appealed by the County to the Supreme Court.
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Thurgood Marshall, Leon A. Ransom, William H. Hastie
Attorney for the Defendant: Noah A. Hillman, William C. Walsh.
Walter Mills, a black schoolteacher in the Anne Arundel County, Maryland, sued the county board of education and its superintendent over schoolteacher salaries. A Maryland State statute set lower minimum salaries for schoolteachers employed at a “colored school,” than for schoolteachers employed at a “whites only” school. The statutory minimum annual salary was $1250 for white teachers and $765 for black teachers. The Court ordered a cessation of salary discrimination based on race, but refused to order the board not to pay black teachers less than white teachers.

Henderson v. United States Interstate Commerce Commission and Southern Railway Co., 339 U. S. 816 [Segregation]
1950, Baltimore, Maryland
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson
Attorney for the Plaintiff: B. V. Lawson, Josiah F. Henry, Jr.
Attorney for the Defendant: Daniel w. Knowlton, Allen Chrenshaw, Bernard J. Flynn, Edward Dumbald, William McFarlane, Charles Clark, A. J. Dixon
Elmer W. Henderson, a black man, filed a complaint the against the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) after not being served in the dining car of the Southern Railway while he was traveling from Washington D. C., to Atlanta, Georgia. White passengers, moreover, were allowed to occupy seats in the black section of the dining car, which was separated from the white section by a curtain. The lower courts held that separate seating satisfied the separate-but-equal dictum of Plessy. Henderson brought suit after traveling “First Class” on the railway from Washington D.C. to Atlanta, Georgia. Although the Court refused to address the question of the Constitutionality of Plessy, it did hold that Henderson had been denied equal access in violation of the Interstate Commerce Act, and that use of curtains and partitions underlined “the artificiality of a difference in treatment.” After finding that the plaintiff had been discriminated against by railway's failure to furnish him with service equal to that furnished white passengers, the Court dismissed the complaint on the finding that the situation had been corrected by the amendment of an ICC regulation.