Thurgood Marshall, A Freemason who changed our country 2/16/08

• Born: 2 July 1908
• Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: 24 January 1993 (heart failure)
• Best Known As: The first African-American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

Less well know than Martin Luther King, Jr or Malcolm X Brother Thurgood Marshall, a Mason, fundamentally changed our country

Georgetown University Law Professor Thomas Krattenmaker said of Thurgood Marshall,

“He is certainly the most important lawyer of the twentieth century.”

Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, universally described as a true Southern white gentleman, said of Thurgood Marshall,

“He, in my opinion, did more to establish equal justice under the law than Martin Luther King or any other single individual.”

Attorney Thurgood Marshall led the civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to a successful hearing at the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954.

He became the court's first African-American justice 13 years later. The descendant of slaves, Marshall graduated from all-black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930, then received a law degree from Howard University in 1933.

He opened his own law practice in Baltimore and became known as a lawyer who would speak up for the rights of African-Americans; this led him to a job with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1936.

He spent more than two decades with the NAACP, gaining his greatest fame for the case of Brown v. Board of Education from 1952-54. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," Marshall and the NAACP won a great victory for civil rights.

Marshall was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals (Second Circuit) in 1961, then appointed to the post of solicitor general in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court itself in 1967, where he served for 24 years before he retired in 1991. Marshall was known as a liberal throughout his tenure.

Read more about Marshall here, here and here.
Marshall discusses some of this work with the NAACP in an interviewhere. 
Marshall is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Read about it here.