Photo: Robert S. Oakes, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. The University of Maryland law school would not admit Black students, so he went to Howard University’s law school, where he studied under Charles Hamilton Houston.
The NAACP years
In 1936 Marshall joined the NAACP’s legal staff, and he later led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He traveled across the South trying cases, sometimes at real risk to his safety.
He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29. The best known is Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, in which the court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
On the bench
President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the federal appeals court in 1961. President Lyndon Johnson made him solicitor general in 1965 and nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1967. He was the first Black justice.
On the court he became known for his dissents, especially against the death penalty. He retired in 1991 and died in 1993. Baltimore’s main airport is named for him.
