Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908. He grew up during the Harlem Renaissance and other liberation movements for blacks in America. Thurgood attended Lincoln University and graduated cum laude in 1930. He went on to graduate magna cum laude from Howard University Law School, and started his private practice the same year in Baltimore. In 1934, he became the counsel for the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. He joined the national legal staff in 1936 and became Chief Officer in 1938.
Thurgood was named director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Thurgood had a mission to end racial segregation. He carried his mission for his entire life, but he fought for the NAACP for more than twenty years. His tenure was a pivotal time for the organization, as overturning racial segregation was one of its prime directives. He coordinated, directed, and carried out the NAACP effort to end racial segregation. He, along with his mentor Charles Hamilton (the first black lawyer to win a case at the Supreme Court), developed a long-term strategy fort getting rid of segregation in schools, as well as, society. The two of them first concentrated on graduate schools, mainly because they felt that a white judge would be more likely to sympathize with ambitious young blacks in those settings. In the cases Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, both in 1950 he argued and abolished "separate but equal" facilities for African-American profession!.
als and graduate students in state universities. In 1944 he ended Southern state's exclusion of African-American voters from primary elections (Smith v. Allwright). He argued Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, a case about restrictive covenants and the Supreme Court declared that "restrictive covenants" in housing are unconstitutional.
This culminated in the landmark decision in 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education which declared segregation of public schools illegal.
