Thurgood Marshall

Marshall was turned away from the University of Maryland law school because he was Black, went to Howard instead, and one of his first victories as a lawyer was forcing Maryland to admit a Black applicant. For over twenty years he travelled the segregated South for the NAACP, often at real physical risk, arguing cases in courthouses where he could not eat in the restaurant. He argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court and won twenty-nine.

The greatest was Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which held that separate schools are inherently unequal and overturned a doctrine that had stood for fifty-eight years. Lyndon Johnson made him Solicitor General and then, in 1967, the first Black justice of the Supreme Court, where he served twenty-four years and became its most consistent voice against the death penalty and for the rights of the poor and the accused. He is buried at Arlington. His stone carries no list of offices, only his name, his dates, and the words that he was a lawyer.