Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908. Thurgood’s mother, Norma, was a teacher. His father, William, was a waiter for a railroad company. Thurgood had an older brother, William Aubrey. Thurgood was named after his grandfather, Thoroughgood, a freed slave, who served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

When Thurgood was young , black people and white people lived in separate neighborhoods. This was called segregation, and it was legal. Blacks and whites attended different schools, ate at different restaurants, and played in different parks. Thurgood dreamed of becoming a lawyer, so that he could fight to end segregation. He became a very serious student, and by the time he graduated high school, Thurgood had memorized the U. S. Constitution!

After  high school, Thurgood attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where all of the students were black males. In his senior year, Thurgood met Vivian Burey, and they were married on September 4, 1929. Thurgood graduated from college the next year, and went on to study law at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He had wanted to attend law school at the University of Maryland, but they wouldn’t admit him because he was black.

Vivian Burey

After law school, Thurgood took a job with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Believing that segregation went against the Constitution, he took the case of Donald Murray, an African-American man who had also been denied admission to the University of Maryland. The court ordered that Mr. Murray be admitted immediately. Soon after, Thurgood won his first case in the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest court.

Donald Murray case

In 1954, Marshall was a lawyer in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.   He filed this lawsuit on behalf of a group of black parents whose children were forced to attend all-black segregated schools. In Thurgood’s most important court victory, the judges decided to end segregation in schools, because it denied equal educational opportunities to children of minority groups. Thurgood became so well-known that a song titled “Thurgood Marshall, Mr. Civil Rights” was written about him.