Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908. He graduated from Lincoln University of Pennsylvania in 1930 and graduated from Howard University Law School in 1933.
Thurgood served the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) as counsel to the Baltimore Branch. He later joined the national legal staff in 1936 and became Chief Legal Officer in 1938.
As an excellent lawyer, Marshall argued before the U.S. Supreme Court thirty-two times, of which twenty-nine he won. Among these twenty-nine cases, one was the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board.
From 1961 to 1965, he served the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals and as U.S. solicitor general from 1965 to 1967. On June 13, 1967, President Lydon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall became the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court on August 30, 1967. He retired in 1991 after serving the Supreme Court for twenty-three years. During this time, he worked hard to defend civil rights and individual liberties.
