INGLEWOOD : Plaza May Be Named for Justice Marshall

Inglewood expects to become the first city in the Southland to honor the late Supreme Court justice and civil rights leader Thurgood Marshall by naming a public place after him.

The City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors are scheduled to vote Tuesday to name the adjoining area outside the Inglewood City Hall and the county’s Municipal Court building the Thurgood Marshall Justice Plaza.

Marshall, a legal giant in the history of American civil rights and a Supreme Court justice for 24 years, died Jan. 24.

If the vote is approved, a dedication ceremony will be in the plaza Friday at noon. The naming of the area, which encompasses two plazas and a connecting walkway, was proposed by Inglewood Mayor Edward Vincent and Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

In announcing the move on Friday, Vincent called Marshall “an excellent example of what can happen within the system regardless of ethnicity. He stayed within the system and he changed things through nonviolent judicial change.”

Marshall, the mayor said, furthered the civil rights of all Americans, not just those of African-Americans. “And he did it through education . . . through perseverance,” Vincent said. “He did it with smarts, getting an education and staying focused. That’s why he’s a tremendous role model for all young people and, particularly, blacks. Don’t burn. Learn.”

Marshall, as head of the Legal Defense Fund of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, was the architect of the legal strategy that brought legally sanctioned segregation to an end in the South. The high point of those years was the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, that said separate schools denied black children an equal education.