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Quick Facts
- NAME: Thurgood Marshall
- OCCUPATION: Civil Rights Activist, Legal Professional
- BIRTH DATE: July 02, 1908
- DEATH DATE: January 24, 1993
- EDUCATION: Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, Lincoln University, Howard University School of Law
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Baltimore, Maryland
- PLACE OF DEATH: Bethesda, Maryland
Best Known For
Thurgood Marshall declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional with the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Videos see all videos
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Thurgood Marshall - Full Episode (46:39)
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Thurgood Marshall - Mini Bio (2:13)
Thurgood Marshall - Full Episode
Thurgood Marshall, the crusading attorney and civil rights activist who led the fight against school desegregation, became the first African-American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thurgood Marshall - Mini Bio
Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American to serve on the United States Supreme Court. He was also one of the most effective Civil Rights crusaders of the 20th Century.
Thurgood Marshall. (2012). Biography.com. Retrieved 12:57, May 24, 2012 from http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241
Thurgood Marshall [Internet]. 2012. http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241, May 24
" Thurgood Marshall." 2012. Biography.com 24 May 2012, 12:57 http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241
' Thurgood Marshall', Biography.com,(2012) http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241 [accessed May 24, 2012]
" Thurgood Marshall," Biography.com, http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241 (accessed May 24, 2012).
Thurgood Marshall [Internet]. Biography.com; 2012 [cited 2012 May 24]. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241.
Thurgood Marshall, http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241 (last visited May 24, 2012).
Thurgood Marshall, http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241 (last visited May 24, 2012).
Synopsis
Thurgood Marshall was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.
Quotes
"Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
"In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute."
"Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place."
"None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots."
"Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
" The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis."
Profile
Lawyer; Supreme Court Justice. Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Marshall, the grandson of a slave, worked as a steward at an exclusive club and his mother, Norma, was a kindergarten teacher. One of William Marshall's favorite pastimes was to listen to cases at the local courthouse before returning home to rehash the lawyers' arguments with his sons. Thurgood Marshall later recalled, "Now you want to know how I got involved in law? I don't know. The nearest I can get is that my dad, my brother, and I had the most violent arguments you ever heard about anything. I guess we argued five out of seven nights at the dinner table."
Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (since renamed Frederick Douglass Senior High School), where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. The teenaged Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution, was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class. After graduating from high school in 1926, Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. There he joined a remarkably distinguished student body that included Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, Langston Hughes, the great poet, and Cab Calloway, the famous jazz singer.
After graduating from Lincoln with honors in 1930, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Despite being overqualified academically, Marshall was rejected because of his race. This firsthand experience with discrimination in education made a lasting impression on Marshall and helped determine the future course of his career. Instead of Maryland, Marshall attended law school in Washington, D.C. at Howard University, another historically black school. The dean of Howard Law at the time was the pioneering civil rights lawyer Charles Houston. Marshall quickly fell under the tutelage of Houston, a notorious disciplinarian and extraordinarily demanding professor. Marshall recalled of Houston, "He would not be satisfied until he went to a dance on the campus and found all of his students sitting around the wall reading law books instead of partying." Marshall graduated magna cum laude from Howard in 1933.
After graduating from law school, Marshall briefly attempted to establish his own practice in Baltimore, but without experience he failed to land any significant cases. In 1934, he began working for the Baltimore branch of
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