“Mr. Civil Rights”
Thurgood Marshall grew up in a nurturing African American community in segregated Baltimore. After graduating from all-black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he enrolled in Howard University’s law school. In 1934 he began practicing law in his hometown and immediately was drawn into the local civil rights movement.
In 1938 Marshall took over the leadership of the NAACP legal team from his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston. A year later, he established the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to carry out the organization’s legal campaign. Marshall’s legal skills, his earthy wit, and easy manner made him an effective leader.
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall moved to New York and joined the NAACP legal staff in 1936.
(Courtesy of Library of Congress)
Thurgood Marshall as a boy
Thurgood Marshall’s high school graduation photograph at age 17. His father was a railroad dining-car porter and steward at a country club; his mother, a homemaker, was a graduate of the historically black Coppin Normal School.
(Courtesy of Supreme Court Historical Society)
Marshall, Donald Gaines Murray and Houston
Soon after graduating from law school, Thurgood Marshall took the case of Donald Gaines Murray, an African American student seeking admission to the University of Maryland School of Law. This case went to the state Supreme Court and successfully challenged segregated education in Maryland. Shown here are Marshall, Donald Gaines Murray, and Charles Houston during the 1933 suit against the University of Maryland.
(Courtesy of Library of Congress)
Roy Wilkins, Walter White and Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP
Thurgood Marshall poses with the two principal officers of the NAACP: Walter White, the national secretary, center, and Roy Wilkins, the assistant national secretary.
(Courtesy of Library of Congress)
Continue to 
