Thurgood Marshall

"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." ~ Thurgood Marshall

The grandson of slaves, Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where his classmates included Langston Hughes, Kwame Nkrumah, and Cab Calloway. Denied entrance to the University of Maryland Law School, he applied to Howard University where he graduated at the top of his class.

In 1936 he followed law school mentor Charles Hamilton Houston to New York, where he became Chief Counsel of the NAACP. He served as director of the Legal Defense and Education Fund for over 20 years, winning 29 out of 32 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education. During this time he was also asked by the United Nations to help draft constitutions for the emerging democracies of Ghana and what is now Tanzania.

President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (covering New York, Connecticut and Vermont). In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him U.S. Solicitor General, and in 1967 to the U.S. Supreme Court where he was the first African American to serve. Despite the increasingly conservative makeup of the court, he retained his life-long commitment to freedom and equality for all Americans. He retired due to failing health in 1991, and died on January 24, 1993.