In the July 2025 issue of the Braille Monitor, we shared an update on the Museum of the Blind People’s Movement (https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm25/bm2507/bm250707.htm).
On May 21, 2025, John Paré, Executive Director of Advocacy and Policy at the National Federation of the Blind, spoke to the Maryland Board of Public Works to secure state funding for the museum. John presented historic artifacts from the NFB archives, including a letter from Thurgood Marshall to Jacobus tenBroek. Governor Wes Moore declared the letter “amazing.” Below is an article from the November 2010 Braille Monitor with background information about the letter, followed by the full transcript of the letter. This letter is just one of the many treasures in our national archives, and this history is an example of the powerful stories that we will celebrate in the Museum of the Blind People’s Movement.
All Federationists know that Jacobus tenBroek was the founder and first president of the NFB, but many are unaware that he was also a towering figure in the field of constitutional law. In fact, tenBroek’s scholarship helped establish the legal underpinnings of the civil rights movement by demonstrating the applicability of the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment to matters of racial discrimination and segregation. Though it is now fundamental to American civil rights law, prior to tenBroek’s groundbreaking work the equal protection clause was often regarded as “the last resort of constitutional lawyers.”
In his 1949 California Law Review article, “The Equal Protection of the Law” (coauthored by Joseph Tussman), and in his 1951 book, The Antislavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment, Jacobus tenBroek provided lawyers and judges the tools needed to determine when a law improperly discriminates by excluding or including a class of people. A letter in the Jacobus tenBroek papers illustrates this important service.
In August 1953, Thurgood Marshall, then the director and counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, wrote to Dr. tenBroek, “As you know, we are trying to get together as much material as possible for our rearguments of the school segregation cases in the Supreme Court this fall. We have taken full advantage of your book, Anti-Slavery [sic] Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment, and many of our research people have been using it.”
Marshall’s letter went on to request a meeting with Dr. tenBroek to discuss some of the ideas and conclusions the NAACP lawyers were developing. This letter may be viewed by visitors to the Jacobus tenBroek Library in the NFB Jernigan Institute, where it is archived as part of the tenBroek papers collection.
The meeting between Thurgood Marshall and Jacobus tenBroek never took place, but on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared that segregation by race in the public schools was unconstitutional. Specifically, in Brown v. Board of Education, the high court held that the separate but equal doctrine failed to meet the requirements of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. tenBroek’s scholarship had led to a new era in race relations in the United States.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first Black person to serve in that position. Marshall died in 1993 at age eighty-four, two years after retiring. Jacobus tenBroek died at age fifty-six in 1968. In a relatively short life, tenBroek achieved a huge amount for the blind, all disabled people, and indeed all Americans.
N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
107 West 43rd Street, New York 36, N.Y.
JUDSON 6-8397
August 18, 1953
Professor Jacobus tenBroek University of California
Berkeley, California
Dear Professor tenBroek:
As you know, we are trying to get together as much material as possible for our rearguments of the school segregation cases in the Supreme Court this Fall. We have taken full advantage of your book "Anti-Slavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment" and many of our research people have been using it.
I expect to be in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday, August 28th and 29th. If you expect to be in Berkeley at that time, I would like very much to come over and talk over with you some of the ideas we have. I would like to do this in order to check on some of our conclusions. I assure you I would appreciate very much this opportunity to talk with you, if it can be arranged.
Sincerely,
Thurgood Marshall Director and Counsel
TM:abs
[The back side of the letter includes a list of the NAACP National Officers, Executive Officers, Board of Directors, National Legal Committee, and “Committee of 100.”]