Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was born on 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, to a father who worked as a railroad porter and club steward and a mother who taught kindergarten. He attended Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania, where classmates included the poet Langston Hughes and future Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. He initially applied to the University of Maryland School of Law but was rejected because of his race, an injustice that would come to define his life's work.

Marshall instead attended Howard University School of Law, graduating first in his class in 1933 under the mentorship of Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, who was building a legal strategy to systematically dismantle segregation through the courts. Marshall became one of Houston's closest collaborators, and in 1940 he founded and became chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, travelling constantly across the segregated South to argue cases, often at real personal risk.

Over the following decades Marshall built an extraordinary record before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of the 32 cases he argued there — a success rate virtually unmatched in the Court's history. His cases dismantled segregation piece by piece: in graduate schools, in housing, in interstate transport, and most famously in public education. In 1954 he argued Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, overturning the 'separate but equal' doctrine that had stood since 1896.

In 1961 President Kennedy appointed Marshall to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and in 1965 President Johnson named him US Solicitor General, the government's chief advocate before the Supreme Court — the first Black American to hold that role. In 1967 Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court itself, and he was confirmed, becoming the first Black Justice in the Court's history.

During his 24 years on the bench, Marshall consistently championed civil liberties, the rights of criminal defendants, and expansive interpretations of constitutional protection for the disadvantaged, often finding himself in dissent as the Court grew more conservative in his later years. He remained a fierce, uncompromising voice for the principle that the Constitution's protections must extend fully and equally to all Americans regardless of race, wealth or circumstance.

Marshall retired from the Court in 1991 due to declining health and died in 1993. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and institutions across the country, including Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and numerous law schools and public buildings, now bear his name in recognition of a legal career that reshaped American constitutional law more fundamentally than almost any other individual of the 20th century.