Thurgood Marshall was born and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He was named after his grandfather, a former slave, who changed his name to Thoroughood after he entered the United States Army. His father, William Marshall, served as a railroad porter and head steward at an all white club. Thurgood graduated from an all black high school when he was sixteen years old. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Just before graduation, Thurgood married a woman named Vivien Burey and they were married until she passed away from cancer in 1955.

With high honors, Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in 1930. Meanwhile, he applied to the University of Maryland School of Law, which rejected him because he was black. Instead, he decided to attend Howard University in Washington D.C. and graduated first in his class. After receiving his law degree, he began his private practice in Baltimore in 1933.

He retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 due to health deterioration and advanced age. Marshall said at a 1991 news conference on his retirement that he wished to be remembered with ten words: "That he did what he could with what he had." Marshall soon died of heart failure two years after his retirement. He is now buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

His first main goal was to get rid of segregation in schools. He concentrated first on graduate and professional schools because he believed that the white judges would be more sympathetic to the blacks with ambition. He started winning more and more cases and then moved on to the elementary and high schools.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as Solicitor General of the United States, which is basically the nation's chief counsel. Two years later, President Johnson nominated Marshall to fill the spot of Justice Thomas C. Clark in the Supreme Court. Marshall was very hesitant at first because he did not want to let his friends in the Civil Rights Movement down. Ultimately, he took the job because he did not want to pass up such an opportunity. Marshall argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them. He was the first African American to sit on the high court, where he consistently supported the

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