Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908, the grandson of a slave, and graduated from an all-Black high school there (Finkelman; Thurgood). He attended Lincoln University in Chester, Pennsylvania, the oldest Black college in America, and married his first wife just before graduating. He then applied to the University of Maryland Law School but was denied admission because he was Black, something which would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was accepted at Howard University Law School, the oldest Black college in America, and graduated with honors, first in his class, in 1930.
At Howard, Marshall came under the influence of Charles Hamilton Houston who stressed the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy vs. Ferguson, which established the legal doctrine of "separate and equal" (Thurgood). Marshall's first major court case was in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland and secured the admission to that university of an African American graduate from Amherst University, Donald Gaines Murray.
Marshall had a private law practice in Baltimore for a while, then moved to New York as a staff lawyer for the NAACP, and later became their Chief Counsel (Finkelman; Thurgood). From 1930 to 1961 he served as director and chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In his position with the NAACP, he helped develop and implement a strategy for fighting racial segregation throughout the United States. He worked with local communities to gain support for the plan, and argued numerous cases in local, state and federal court and the United States Supreme Court on their behalf. Marshall won almost all the cases he argued before the Supreme Court.
While in New York, he was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to draft the constitution for Ghana and what is now Tanzania (Thurgood). They believed that anyone who worked so hard to secure the rights...