One of the most far-reaching civil rights rulings by the Supreme Court was successfully argued by the grandson of a slave. It was the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., case, and it abolished segregation in the nation's public schools. The gifted lawyer who won the case was Thurgood Marshall, who later got his own seat on the nation's highest court. Marshall will be honored on a postage stamp Tuesday, the first U.S. stamp of 2003. Marshall will become the 26th African-American honored in the Black Heritage series. Marshall was born in 1908 in Baltimore.

He attended historically black Lincoln University in Chester, Pa., where his classmate included such influential black leaders as writer Langston Hughes; Kwame Nkrumah, a future president of Ghana; and musician Cab Calloway.

After graduating cum laude, Marshall applied in 1930 to the law school at the University of Maryland but was turned down because he was black. He went on to the Howard University Law School and graduated magna cum laude in 1933. Ironically, one of his first important court victories was in a suit against the University of Maryland to admit a black graduate student.

In 1936, Marshall became assistant general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York. By 1940, he was the legal director of the national civil rights organization.

President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1961. Marshall made 112 rulings, none overturned by the Supreme Court.

Marshall was named solicitor general of the United States by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. And in 1967, Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court, the first African-American to serve on it.

Marshall had a strong commitment to constitutional rights and opposition to the death penalty in his 24-year tenure on the court. He died in 1993.

He will become the ninth Supreme Court justice to appear on a U.S. stamp. The others were John Jay, John Marshall, William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, Earl Warren, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black.

The portrait on the Marshall stamp was taken from a 1967 photograph, taken shortly after he became a justice. 

by Inky.com