Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer and the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving from 1967 to 1991. A student of Charles Hamilton Houston at Howard University, he led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, among them Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court held segregated public education unconstitutional in 1954. On the court he frequently dissented as it grew more conservative, and fervently opposed the death penalty.