By Joan Biskupic | CNN

Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall, the spouse of the late Supreme Court docket Justice and civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, died Tuesday at age 94, the courtroom’s public data workplace introduced.

Like her husband, Marshall had labored for the NAACP within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s. She was born in Hawaii and moved to New York, the place she grew to become a stenographer, in response to particulars of her formative years offered by the courtroom. No explanation for dying was given.

Thurgood Marshall, the primary Black justice within the courtroom’s historical past, had retired in 1991 and died in 1993. However Cecilia Marshall, recognized for her heat, exuberance, and enduring curiosity within the courtroom, continued to attend oral arguments and extracurricular courtroom festivities, typically with their son Thurgood Marshall Jr.

“You wished to take a seat subsequent to her at any occasion,” Chief Justice John Roberts stated in an announcement Tuesday that captured her persona. “She had a simple humorousness that could possibly be — in an applicable setting, in fact — a bit saucy.”

He famous that Marshall typically sat in a reserved part for spouses at oral arguments and Supreme Court docket Historic Society occasions. Roberts stated she hardly ever missed an investiture or different Supreme Court docket event.

Justice Elena Kagan, who was a legislation clerk for Justice Marshall in the course of the 1987-88 session, stated in an announcement on Tuesday, “Each clerk to Justice Marshall acquired a kind of bonus: the steadfast friendship and help of his spouse, Cissy. She was a fabulous girl, and all of us liked and admired her. The neighborhood of TM clerks will immediately really feel an awesome loss.”

Born Cecilia Suyat in 1928 in Pu’unene, Maui, in Hawaii, she would later transfer to New York Metropolis, the place she took evening lessons at Columbia College to turn out to be a stenographer. She labored for the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals (NAACP) from 1948-1955.

Thurgood Marshall, earlier than becoming a member of the bench in 1967, led the NAACP Authorized Protection and Training Fund. In that place, he was chief counsel for the collection of circumstances that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Training choice placing down the “separate however equal” doctrine in public faculties.