His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution, was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class.Īfter graduating from high school in 1926, Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania. The teenage Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (later renamed Frederick Douglass High School), where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. I guess we argued five out of seven nights at the dinner table.' Education The nearest I can get is that my dad, my brother and I had the most violent arguments you ever heard about anything. Thurgood later recalled, 'Now you want to know how I got involved in law? I don't know. One of William's favorite pastimes was to listen to cases at the local courthouse before returning home to rehash the lawyers' arguments with his sons.

His father, William Marshall, was the grandson of an enslaved person who worked as a steward at an exclusive club, and his mother, Norma, was a kindergarten teacher. Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. Board of Educationcase, in which the Supreme Court ended racial segregation in public schools. As counsel to the NAACP, he utilized the judiciary to champion equality for African Americans. Marshall studied law at Howard University. He was the first African American to hold the position and served for 24 years, until 1991. Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer who was appointed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1967.

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