Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908 in Baltimore, MD. The great-grandson of a slave, he was raised with a deep respect for the US Constitution, committing Articles to memory in high school. He enrolled at Lincoln University in Chester County, PA and, upon graduation, applied to the University of Maryland law school—only to be denied entrance because of his race. And so began Marshall’s crusade against the injustices that were all too common in America. Today he is memorialized at the State House.

Charles Hamilton Houston served in France in WWI. He said of the injustices ingrained in the military, “The hate and scorn showered on Negro officers by our fellow Americans…convinced me that there was no sense in dying for a world ruled by them.” He graduated from Harvard law in 1923, dedicated to instructing a new generation of African American lawyers with the ability to bring down segregation. By 1929 he was Vice-Dean of Howard U. Law School, where Thurgood Marshall would become his star.

Marshall’s first case after law school was against the University of Maryland for refusing to admit Donald Gaines Murray based solely on his race. Marshall argued Gaines must be admitted because the state offered no comparable school that admitted African Americans. The Court of Appeals ruled the state could not deny Black students access to graduate professional education. It was but one precedent in a long-term plan to overcome segregated education—memorialized at his former elementary school.

In 1936 Thurgood Marshall followed his mentor Charles Houston to New York to become a staff lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1940, he was named chief of the NAACP Legal Defense. In this capacity, Marshall succesfully fought state laws denying African Americans the right to vote in primaries, and others providing for “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans at universities. The U.S. Court of Appeals courthouse now bears his name.

Marshall’s crowning achievement was arguing Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka. He used arguments, still studied in law schools today for their excellence, to lead the Supreme Court to rule school segregation an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment. Marshall would go on to win 29 of 30 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. During oral arguments he often stayed at the Twelfth Street YMCA—now the Thurgood Marshall Center—a hub for Black professionals during segregation.

Marshall’s tireless work building legal precedents to end discrimination propelled the civil rights movement, garnering national attention. Appointed to the US Court of Appeals by Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1961, he was promoted to the position of the United States Solicitor General in 1965. In 1967, Pres. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court, and on August 30 Marshall became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the first African-American to hold that position.

According to Juan Williams, author of the biography Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, Marshall did more to erase the color line in America than anyone in history. “It was Thurgood Marshall, working through the courts to eradicate the legacy of slavery and destroying the racist segregation system of Jim Crow, who had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either King or X.” Marshall was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in 1993.

This Guide comes to you from the Smithsonian Institution's National Postal Museum, where we preserve the stories of great Americans, our art, history, scientific achievements, and landscapes—all memorialized on postage stamps—and share those stories with you. Follow the link below to see other historic people and events immortalized on stamps in our Apple Maps Guides collection, and over 50 others Guides from the Smithsonian family of 16 Metro-accessible museums in the DC area, and more beyond.