Henry Highland Garnet School
Attended by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall

View of school from Division Street

Built in 1877, the Henry Highland Garnet School/PS 103 was the elementary school attended byThurgood Marshall from 1914-1920: his first six years of segregated public school education. Marshall, the first African American Justice on the United States Supreme Court, was born in Baltimore in 1908, grew up in this community and formed his enduring moral and legal viewpoints. It was in the segregated schools of Baltimore that Justice Marshall memorized the Constitution and first learned and understood the principles of equal protection under the law. Marshall won his first civil rights victories in Baltimore.

According to Juan Williams, author, news analyst, and journalist,

“It was Marshall who ended legal segregation in the United States….It was Marshall who won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools….”

Henry Garnet

The school was named in honor of Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), a famous African Americanabolitionist and orator, who was born a slave in Kent County, Maryland. Early in his life Garnet and his family escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad. He became a Presbyterian minister and well known abolitionist speaker. He used his moral persuasion to urge blacks to take political action. He urged blacks to “claim their own destinies.” Garnet supported the emigration of blacks to Mexico, Liberia, and the West Indies and founded the African Civilization Society. He was also the first African American to deliver a sermon to the U.S. House of Representatives. After the Civil War, he was appointed U.S. Minister to Liberia where he died in 1882.

1315 Division Street, Baltimore, MD 21217