Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland and died on January 24, 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland. He was a famous African-American lawyer who started working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1933. While working for the NAACP for twenty-five years, he argued many important cases in front of the Supreme Court against discrimination of African-Americans. Some say Marshall helped to start the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. (Thurgood Marshall was an important figure during the civil rights era because he won the famous case, Brown v. Board of Education, ending racial segregation in public schools and he became the first African-American Supreme Court justice.) Thurgood’s early life was influenced by his parents who thought education was the number one priority. He was raised in a middle-class family by a mother who was an elementary school teacher and a father who was waiter and a country club steward. Marshall’s father was very interested in the law and would take his sons to observe court cases on his days off. They would later debate those cases at the dinner table often getting in arguments about them. Marshall was frequently in trouble at school and as a punishment had to memorize parts of the U.S. …show more content…
He changed many laws dealing with racial inequalities and desegregated the American public school system. He tried to teach others the Declaration of Independence stated “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Many believe he should be as famous as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. After Marshall's death, an obituary read: "We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood