THURGOOD MARSHALL’S CHILDHOOD HOME
Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), the grandson of a slave and the nation’s first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, grew up in Old West Baltimore. He attended segregated public schools and worked in stores along nearby Pennsylvania Avenue. As a young boy, Marshall’s family lived in this house.
In 1930 Marshall was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of his race. Instead he commuted to Howard University Law School in Washington, DC. Marshall began practicing law in Baltimore after his 1933 graduation from Howard University. Two years later, he took the University of Maryland to court on behalf of Donald Murray. He won the case, forcing the university to admit Murray, its first black student since the 1890s.
Marshall joined the legal staff of the NAACP in 1938. As counsel for the NAACP, Marshall won 29 out of 32 U.S. Supreme Court cases from 1938 to 1961, becoming the country’s “greatest civil rights lawyer and constitutional lawyer of the twentieth century.”
His most famous case is the landmark 1954 civil rights case Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. Marshall and a team of lawyers and sociologists argued that “separate” educational facilities for black and white children could never be “equal.” The court unanimously ruled that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional. Thurgood Marshall led the fight to dismantle the “separate but equal” doctrine in public education and won.
