Thurgood Marshall

Some historians would argue that the civil rights movement that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. spearheaded during the 1950s and 1960s began with the Supreme Court's decision in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That decision outlawed segregation in public schools and established a precedent for lower courts to invalidate laws that segregated other public places such as beaches, parks, golf courses, and bus terminals. Thurgood Marshall was the leading attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the Brown case. A product of Baltimore's segregated public schools, Marshall earned degrees from Lincoln University and Howard University School of Law, traditional black institutions. Shortly after being admitted to the bar, Marshall went to work for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and began to test segregation...