The Biography of Thurgood Marshall
The Biography of Thurgood Marshall
One man, Thurgood Marshall, has impacted millions of children and adults across America. Thurgood Marshall was an American jurist, civil rights leader, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Encarta Marshall, Thurgood). He was involved in many famous cases, such as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, in which this report will mostly be about. This famous case dealt with racial imbalances in schools in the United States and the lack of equality children in Southern schools faced at that time. This report will also cover Thurgood Marshall and the lawyer (Roy Wilkins) who assisted him in this case.
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908. He was educated at Lincoln University and at Howard University Law School. After graduating, Marshall first practiced law in Baltimore where he specialized in civil rights cases. He then moved to New York City, serving the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), where he was “special counsel (1938-50) and director and counsel of the NAACP legal defense and education fund (1938-61)”(Encarta Marshall, Thurgood). Shortly after these duties, Marshal was admitted to practice before U.S. Supreme Court, where he won 29 out of 32 cases. (Encarta Marshall, Thurgood). During his tenure as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, he was assigned a case known as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka.
A lawyer named Roy Wilkins assisted Marshall. Wilkins was born in 1901 in St. Louis Missouri. He was educated at the University of Minnesota. From 1923 - 1931 he was a journalist in Kansas City, Missouri working on a newspaper for the black population, of which he became managing editor. In 1931, he was appointed assistant executive secretary of the NAACP, the largest civil right organization in the U.S. From 1934 - 1939 he was editor of the crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, (Encarta Wilkins, Roy). Wilkins served as a consultant to the war department on black employment during World War II. After the war, he continued his service for the NAACP; he was executive secretary from 1955 - 1965 and executive director from 1965 until his retirement in 1977. All of these experiences helped him to assist Marshall in a positive way. In assistance to Thurgood Marshall, he played a major role...