Thurgood Marshall

It's the birthday of the first African-American to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1908).

Marshall became the legal director of the NAACP, and of the 32 cases he argued for that organization, he won 29. His biggest case was the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. He went on to serve as an appeals court judge under Kennedy, and Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967.

Thurgood Marshall said: "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody — a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony, or a few nuns — bent down and helped us pick up our boots." The Writer's Almanac