Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908. He graduated high school in 1925 – by that time he’d read the constitution because he was sent to read it when he got into trouble.
He graduated from Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania with honors and applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied because he was Black. Instead, he attended Howard University.
He started his own law practice in 1933. After working with the NAACP, he argued a major court case against the University of Maryland Law School so an African American student could attend and won in 1933. He moved to New York and was appointed the Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As the first Director-Counsel of NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he won a huge case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka which stopped legal segregation in schools.
