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.
As lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall argued and won a string of cases dismantling legal segregation, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that struck down "separate but equal" in public schools.
In 1967 he became the first African American on the Supreme Court, where he served for 24 years as a champion of civil rights and individual liberties.