Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights attorney who became the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.

1. Born: July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland
2. Died: January 24, 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland
3. Supreme Court Justice: June 13, 1967 to June 28, 1991
4. Graduated Lincoln University 1930
5. Received a law degree from Howard University in 1933
6. Began working for the NAACP in 1934
7. Won several important civil rights cases including Murray v. Pearson, Chambers v. Florida, and Brown v. Board of Education
8. Appointed to The U.S. Supreme Court by Lyndon Johnson in 1967

Brief Biography

Born in Baltimore in 1908, Marshall entered law school at Howard University and upon receiving his degree, returned to his hometown to set up a private practice. In 1934, Marshall began arguing cases on behalf of the city's NAACP chapter, and helped win the landmark civil rights case Murray v. Pearson, which overturned the University of Maryland Law School's segregationist admission policies. In 1940, Marshall became Chief Counsel of the NAACP and began arguing cases on the institution's behalf before the United States Supreme Court. In 1954, Marshall helped the NAACP win perhaps the most important Supreme Court case in American legal history, Brown v. Board of Education. that overturned the Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson which allowed states to maintain "separate but equal" facilities for the different races. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court, and until his retirement in 1991, Marshall was one of the Court's most consistently liberal members. Marshall died in 1993 of heart failure at the age of 84.

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