Thurgood Marshall

Biography

Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908, the son of a waiter and a schoolteacher. He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930 and, barred by race from the University of Maryland's law school, studied at Howard University School of Law, where Charles Hamilton Houston taught him to see lawyers as 'social engineers'. He graduated first in his class in 1933.

After a struggling practice in Baltimore, where he and Houston won Murray v. Pearson against the state's law school, Marshall joined Houston at the NAACP in New York in 1936 and succeeded him as special counsel. He became director-counsel of the newly separate NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court. These included challenges to the white primary, segregated interstate buses, racially restrictive covenants and unequal graduate schools, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which struck down segregation in public schools. He returned to the Court in 1958 to defeat Little Rock's attempt to delay integration.

John F. Kennedy named him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961, though Southern senators held up his confirmation for months. In 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson made him Solicitor General, and in 1967 appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he became the first African-American justice. A firm liberal, he was often in the majority under the Warren Court but increasingly in dissent as the Court moved right; he consistently opposed the death penalty and supported abortion rights.

Marshall retired in 1991 and was succeeded by Clarence Thomas. He died in 1993 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.