THURGOOD MARSHALL
• July 2, 1908 Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Lincoln University in 1930 and his Bachelor of Laws degree from Howard University School of Law in 1933. In 1934, he began working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, in 1936 and his first case before the Supreme Court, Chambers v. Florida, in 1940. In total, Marshall won 29 of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His most famous case was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the court ruled that “separate, but equal” public education could never be truly equal. Marshall was the 1946 recipient of the NAACP Spingarn Medal. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and in 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Marshall served on the Supreme Court for 24 years, retiring in 1991. Marshall died January 24, 1993 and there are numerous memorials to him around the country, including the main office building of the federal court system which is named in his honor and has a statue of him in the atrium. In 1976, Texas Southern University named their law school after him and in 1980 the University of Maryland opened the Thurgood Marshall Law Library. Marshall received the Liberty Medal in 1992 in recognition of his long history of protecting individual rights under the Constitution and in 1993 was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President William Clinton. Biographies of Marshall include “Thurgood Marshall: American Revoulutionary” (1998) and “Thurgood Marshall” (2002). Marshall’s name is enshrined in the Ring of Genealogy at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan.
via thewright.org
