Fitting Name for a School

Thurgood Marshall Elementary School is a fine name for Oxnard’s newest school. We hope the students who attend it will be inspired by the example of this civil rights pioneer and U.S. Supreme Court justice whose life embodied both adversity and achievement, the power of education to triumph over ignorance.

Ventura County has schools named after trees, after views and vistas, after neighborhoods and after great people--local or global. While putting a human name on an institution of learning is potentially riskier than naming it after a plant, the decision to name this school was made swiftly and unanimously.

It was a different story last year when the same school board split bitterly over the naming of a school after the district’s longtime superintendent, Norman Brekke.

That controversy reflected the growing political clout of Latinos, who make up more than 70% of the district’s students and in recent years have assumed leadership of the school board as well.

Thurgood Marshall, who died in 1993, was the first African American named to the U.S. Supreme Court. But it is the path that brought him to that historic achievement that makes him such an inspiring role model for the children of Oxnard.

Marshall, the great-grandson of slaves, grew up in Baltimore. Simply because he was black, he could not enroll at his local public school, nor could he and his family shop in downtown department stores, nor could he enroll in the University of Maryland Law School, although he was an excellent student.

He earned his law degree anyway, and in time became head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In that role, he argued before the Supreme Court that the then-common “separate but equal” schools weren’t equal at all--that segregation was inherently damaging to minority children. The Supreme Court agreed and issued its landmark 1954 decision outlawing forced school segregation. For this victory, many legal scholars consider him the most important lawyer of the 20th century.

May each student, parent, teacher and administrator associated with Thurgood Marshall Elementary School follow his example by striving to reach their full potential, to overcome all obstacles, and to eliminate the unfairness that still lingers in this nation where “liberty and justice for all” remains a goal, not a given.