This Sunday will be the 109th birthday of the legendary Black lawyer and jurist Thurgood Marshall, who died in 1993. As a young lawyer, Marshall argued and won the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which mandated the desegregation of schools across the country. Later, he was named Solicitor General — at the time, the highest government post ever held by an African American. And in 1967, he became the first African-American Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But there’s more to Thurgood than the headlines. In honor of his birthday, let’s check out five facts you may not know about the 20th century’s greatest civil rights lawyer, who also happens to be the founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
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