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Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) was the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court.

He served on the court from 1967 until 1991, when he retired due to ill health.

Marshall received his law degree from Howard University in 1933, and set up a private practice in Baltimore. The following year, he began working with the Baltimore NAACP. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, in 1936; his co-counsel on that case was Charles Huston.

Marshall won his first Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, in 1940. He argued many other cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully. His most famous case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public education was illegal because it could never be truly equal.

President Kennedy appointed Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. A group of white southern Senators held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a "recess appointment." Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson appointed him Solicitor General. Johnson then appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967, saying that this was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place."