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Thurgood Marshall
1908-07-02 – 1993-01-24
Civil rights lawyer who argued Brown v. Board and became the first Black Supreme Court Justice.
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Thurgood Marshall was the most important civil rights lawyer of the 20th century and the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. As chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down racial segregation in public schools. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967, where he served for 24 years as a champion of individual rights, equal protection, and the rights of the accused. His legal career transformed American law and helped dismantle the legal foundations of racial segregation.