In 1936 civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall fought for equal pay for Montgomery County’s African American Teachers; an early blow to school segregation.

In a courtroom in Rockville, Maryland, Thurgood Marshall made the case for Montgomery County’s Black school teachers to be paid the same as their white colleagues. Peerless Rockville volunteer historian Ralph Buglass will elaborate on the historical importance of the Gibbs case as the first such one in the nation and an early step toward the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that overturned school segregation. The talk will also look at how the case served as a “shot in the arm” for organizing a countywide chapter of the NAACP, the civil rights organization Marshall, later the first African-American Supreme Court justice, was representing.

This little-known legal case is often seen as the first step in Marshall’s successful drive to have separate schools for white and black children declared unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court did 17 years later in a landmark decision. This illustrated talk details this remarkable local story and its national significance. Spoiler alert: the victory came at a tremendous cost to William Gibbs, the teacher at the center of this case.

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Peerless Rockville Historic Preservation Ltd. is supported in part by a grant from the City of Rockville and funding from the Montgomery County Government and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County.