Thurgood Marshall

Seven of his ten planets sit in cardinal signs, and five of them fill sixteen degrees of Cancer: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Neptune, with Mercury and Venus both retrograde. Water takes five of the ten, fire three, and a single one apiece earth and air. The record says Marshall argued Brown v Board of Education, won twenty nine of the thirty two cases he took to the Supreme Court, and then sat on it for twenty four years as its first Black justice.

The Sun sits square Saturn at half a degree, which is identity meeting a rule that will not move. The standing reading is self doubt, delay and a difficult authority, with the old consolation that what is built under this aspect tends to last. In a working life spent arguing against laws and then sitting in judgement on them, the first half of that reading is a job description and the second half is Brown v Board of Education.

Mercury sits conjunct Neptune at three fifths of a degree, which is imaginative thought: metaphor and fiction, and a standing difficulty with detail, dates and what was actually said. A record of twenty nine wins out of thirty two in the highest court in the country argues flatly with the second half of that, and this summary prints it rather than quietly dropping it. His Moon sits at twenty five degrees of Leo at noon, close enough to the next sign that it may have reached Virgo, which costs this chart its two closest contacts.

He died at Bethesda on 24 January 1993, at eighty four. Jupiter spent that day squaring four of his natal planets, Neptune at a quarter of a degree, Uranus at under half, Mercury at four fifths and Venus at just over a degree, while also sitting sixty degrees from its own natal place at three hundredths. The Moon was new and three per cent lit, which is the phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them.