Thurgood Marshall

July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993

Civil rights lawyer who argued Brown v. Board and became the first Black Supreme Court Justice.

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Before he became the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall spent decades as the movement's most important lawyer, traveling the dangerous roads of the segregated South to defend Black Americans and, case by case, dismantling the legal machinery of Jim Crow. More than almost anyone, he changed America not with a protest sign but with the Constitution. ## The boy who memorized the Constitution Born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall was a sharp, talkative student. As a form of school punishment, he was made to memorize passages of the U.S. Constitution, a document he would spend his life arguing over. Rejected from the University of Maryland's law school because he was Black, he attended the historically Black Howard University, where the dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, trained a generation of lawyers to use the law as a weapon against segregation. ## "Mr. Civil Rights" As chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Marshall crisscrossed the South defending Black clients, often at great personal risk, sleeping in private homes because hotels were closed to him and once narrowly escaping a lynch mob. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29, chipping away at the "separate but equal" doctrine year after year. People called him "Mr. Civil Rights." ## Brown v. Board of Education Marshall's masterpiece was Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Bringing together five school-segregation cases and backing them with social-science evidence like the Clarks' "doll test," he persuaded a unanimous Supreme Court that segregated schools were "inherently unequal." It was one of the most consequential rulings in American history and the legal cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement. ## First on the highest court President Lyndon B. Johnson made Marshall U.S. Solicitor General, the government's top courtroom lawyer, and then, in 1967, appointed him to the Supreme Court, the first African American ever to serve there. For 24 years he was a fierce defender of equal protection, free speech, and the rights of the accused, and a passionate opponent of the death penalty. As the Court grew more conservative, he became famous for his powerful dissents, insisting the Constitution's promises must extend to everyone. ## Legacy Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991 and died in 1993. He had lived a rare double life in the law: first as the advocate who tore down segregation from the outside, then as the justice who guarded equal rights from within. You can study his greatest case in the Landmark Supreme Court Cases journey. ## Learn more Hear his cases and read about his life at Oyez: Justice Thurgood Marshall or the Wikipedia biography.

Thurgood Marshall

Further reading

Thurgood Marshall

Further reading