Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on 2 July 1908, the son of a railway porter and a schoolteacher. As a schoolboy he was made to read the Constitution as a punishment and came to know it well. He studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and, barred by his race from the University of Maryland's law school, at Howard University's law school, where he graduated first in his class in 1933. His mentor Charles Hamilton Houston trained a generation of Black lawyers to attack segregation through the courts. Marshall's early victory in Murray v. Pearson (1936) opened Maryland's law school to Black students. As chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, founded in 1940, he travelled the segregated South, often at personal risk, and argued dozens of cases, winning most of them before the Supreme Court. His greatest victory was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held segregated public schools unconstitutional. He became a federal appeals judge in 1961, Solicitor General in 1965, and in 1967 the first African American justice of the Supreme Court, serving until 1991. An Episcopalian, he died on 24 January 1993.

Faith: An Episcopalian; the Episcopal Church added him to its calendar of commemorations. Source: Wikipedia

See also: John Marshall Harlan · Martin Luther King Jr.