Thurgood Marshall Lawyer, Civil Rights Leader, Supreme Court Justice Issued on January 7, 2003 in Washington D.C. Designed by Richard Sheaff - Scott #3746 The 26th Stamp in the Black Heritage Series

First Day Covers of the January 7, 2003 Thurgood Marshall issue produced by members of the ESPER Stamp Club.
     
Thurgood Marshall Autographed Cover - "Right to Petition" Issue of 1977
       
Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Thurgood Marshall received his bachelors from Lincoln University in 1930 and graduated from Howard University Law School in 1933 as the class Valedictorian. From 1936 to 1940 Thurgood worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1940 he became chief of its legal staff. He won 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. Thurgood successfully argued the civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. This was the landmark case in which racial segregation in American public schools was declared unconstitutional. In addition to Brown, he successfully argued cases in which the court declared unconstitutional a Southern state's exclusion of black voters from primary elections (Smith v. Allwright, 1944), state judicial enforcement of racial “restrictive covenants” in housing (Shelly v. Kraemer, 1948), and “separate but equal” facilities for black professionals and graduate students in state universities (Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, both 1950).

Thurgood was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in September 1961,  by President John F. Kennedy, but opposition from Southern senators delayed his confirmation for several months. President Lyndon B. Johnson named Thurgood as the U.S. solicitor general in July 1965 and nominated him to the Supreme Court in June 1967. Thurgood was a steadfast liberal during his tenure on the court, and he maintained his previous views concerning the need for equitable and just treatment of the nation's minorities by the state and federal governments. By the time he retired in 1991, he was one of the last remaining liberal members of a Supreme Court dominated by a conservative majority

Thurgood Marshall died on January 24, 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland.