Thurgood Marshall

In 1967, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and a year before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first African American was nominated to the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, grandson of a slave, rejected from the University of Maryland Law School because of his skin color and a trailblazing civil rights lawyer, made history when President Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the highest court in the land. 

Photo: wypr.org

Marshall was born in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland and from a young age he was taught to value the US Constitution. In 1925, he and his brother attended a historically black school of higher education, Lincoln University, alongside the poet Langston Hughes and band leader Cab Calloway. When Marshall was denied entry to the University of Maryland Law School, he began to use the Constitution as his legal tool; that rejection helped shape his future career as a civil rights lawyer. 

Photo: lincoln.edu

Marshall attended the Howard University Law School in Washington, DC under the tutelage of Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston, the dean of the school, focused on applying the Constitution to all Americans and argued against the unconstitutionality of Plessy v Ferguson, which enforced segregation through the doctrine of "separate but equal". Three years after his rejection from the University of Maryland, Marshall successfully sued that school when it refused to admit African America Donald Gaines Murray. 

Photo: americanhistory.si.edu

(From left to right, Marshall, Murray, Houston)

After law school, Marshall became Chief Counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In this position, he helped the United Nations and the United Kingdom draft conditions for the new African countries of Ghana and present day Tanzania. When Brown v Board of Education came before the Supreme Court, Marshall was the lawyer for the plaintiffs, all of whom were supported by the NAACP. During the case, Marshall stated: 

"It follows that with education, this Court has made segregation and inequality equivalent concepts. They have equal rating, equal footing, and if segregation thus necessarily imports inequality, it makes no great difference whether we say that the Negro is wronged because he is segregated, or that he is wronged because he received unequal treatment.."

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, a ruling that is considered to be one of the most important and impactful in history. Separate was NOT equal. 

Photo: brownat50.org

When he was named a Supreme Court Justice, Marshall continued his efforts to support equal justice under the law for all Americans, not only for African Americans, but everyone -- women, children, prisoners and the homeless. 

Photo: britannica.com