Justice Thurgood Marshall’s Childhood Home
Denied Law School Admission, becomes U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Thurgood Marshall receiving NAACP Plaque, ca. 1956

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), the grandson of a slave, who became the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice in 1967, grew up in Old West Baltimore, attended segregated public schools, and during his teenage years worked in a Pennsylvania Avenue hat shop. As a young boy, Marshall’s family lived in this house.

In 1930 he was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School (UMLS) because of his race. Instead he commuted to Howard University Law School where Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall’s mentor and law school professor, instilled in him the desire to apply the tenants of the U.S. Constitution to all Americans. Marshall began practicing law in Baltimore after his 1933 graduation from Howard University. Two years later, he took UMLS 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 where he continued to work with Houston. 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.”

“Why, of all the multitudinous groups of people in this country, do you have to single out Negroes and give them this separate treatment?”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1976

Thurgood Marshall reproached the Supreme Court with this and other questions in 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.

President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson named him Solicitor-General, responsible for deciding which cases the Supreme Court would hear. In 1967, he became the first African American Supreme Court Justice, serving from 1967 to 1991.

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