On this day in 1967 the United States Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, 69 votes to 11. He was the first African American to sit on that bench, and he arrived at it by a road most justices never travel.

Before the robe there was the suitcase. For years Marshall was the lawyer of the long drive, carrying briefs into county courthouses where the welcome was uncertain and the law was still being argued from first principles. He appeared thirty-two times before the Court he was now joining, and won twenty-nine of those cases, the last and largest of them Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It is a peculiar thing to be confirmed to a room you already know by heart, down to the acoustics and the temperature of the marble.

The detail I keep returning to is the robe. By the accounts of the time it was not tailored for the occasion but drawn from the Court's own supply, plain black, the same as any other. Fifty-nine years ago today the vote was counted, and a man who had spent his working life asking that institution to keep its promises put on its ordinary robe and took his seat. The photograph below is him in a grey suit, hands clasped over one knee, looking like a man with more to do.