Person · 1908–1993
Thurgood Marshall
The NAACP lawyer who won Brown v. Board of Education and became the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The legal architect of desegregation.
Thurgood Marshall dismantled legal segregation in America's courtrooms before he joined the bench that would enforce that dismantling, making him one of the most consequential lawyers and jurists in American history. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908, Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard University Law School and went to work for the NAACP, rising to lead its Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Over three decades he argued 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won 29 of them — a record that stands as a testament to his legal genius. His crowning achievement came in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine that had sanctioned apartheid in American life since 1896. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court, making him the first African American Supreme Court Justice. He served until 1991, consistently advocating for civil liberties, the rights of the poor, and the abolition of the death penalty. Marshall died on January 24, 1993.