Thurgood Marshall

Thoroughgood Marshall — who shortened his name to Thurgood while in the second grade — was born on the second of July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, the younger of two sons of William Canfield Marshall, a railroad dining-car waiter and steward, and Norma Marshall, an elementary schoolteacher. He was schooled in the ordinary indignities of a segregated city, and he carried them, transmuted, into a life's work.

He was trained in the law at Howard University under Charles Hamilton Houston, who taught him that a lawyer was either a social engineer or a parasite. Marshall became the first director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and across the middle of the century he argued case after case against the machinery of segregation, winning twenty-nine of the thirty-two he brought before the Supreme Court of the United States.

The greatest of these was Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, in which he marshalled the evidence and the argument that led a unanimous Court to strike down "separate but equal" in public schooling. It was a victory won not by force but by patience, proof, and an unshakable faith in the Constitution's promise.

In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson named him to the Supreme Court, and he took his seat as the first African American to serve as a Justice, holding it until 1991; he died on the twenty-fourth of January 1993. He asked the law to mean what it said, and made it so. May the honored name of Thurgood Marshall stand among the builders of a more just house.