Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall's first major victory in his lifelong struggle for equality under the law for all Americans came in the Maryland Court of Appeals, which then stood near this site. In 1935, he successfully argued for the admission of Donald Murray to the University of Maryland School of Law. This was the first step on the road to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in the United States Supreme Court in 1954, which overturned the doctrine of separate but equal established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Marshall fought to achieve the promise expressed in the words above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.: Equal Justice Under Law. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908, he graduated from Frederick Douglass Senior High School in 1925, from Lincoln University with honors in 1930, and from Howard University School of Law in 1933. He began work for the Baltimore Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1934, won Board of Regents of the University of Maryland v. Donald Murray in 1935–1936, became Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1940, won Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka et al in 1954, served as Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 1961 to 1965, served as the United States Solicitor General from 1965 to 1967, and from 1967 to 1991 served as the first African American Justice on the United States Supreme Court.

Annapolis, Maryland · United States