Howard University
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      In 1934, Thurgood Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard University Law School. Marshall wanted to attend the University of Maryland Law School but did not apply after it became clear that he would not be admitted into the segregated institution. The rejection stung deeply, but he refused to be deterred from a legal education by enrolling at one of America's most distinguished HBCUs, Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. He made the long daily commute from Baltimore to Howard because he couldn't afford housing. His mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to help pay the tuition. Marshall nevertheless excelled at Howard, graduating first in his class in 1933.

      At Howard, Marshall made the most important professional friendship and alliance of his career with Professor Charles Hamilton Houston, who served as an important intellectual father to the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States.

      Houston, a Harvard Law School graduate, later served as chief legal counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a position in which he would later be succeeded by Marshall himself. Houston was the first African American lawyer to win a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

      Marshall credited Houston, who died in 1950, with devising the basic legal strategy that ultimately succeeded in legal segregation in the United States, specifically the "separate but equal" provisions of the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

      "Charlie Houston insisted that we be social engineers rather than lawyers," Marshall said in a 1992 interview published by the American Bar Association.  Referring to Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall said, "The school case was really Charlie's victory. He just never got a chance to see it."

A Career and a Cause

      After earning his law degree, Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore in the depths of the Great Depression but quickly found himself in debt by handling civil rights cases for poor clients. In 1934 he went to work for the NAACP. A year later, with Houston as his adviser, Marshall won his first major racial discrimination case, Murray v. Pearson, which ended segregation of the University of Maryland's Law School. The victory over the school that had previously denied him admittance was especially sweet for Marshall, but the decision didn't strike at the heart of segregation since it was won on the grounds that the state of Maryland could not provide a credible "separate but equal" institution for providing African Americans with a legal education.

      In 1936 Marshall became a staff NAACP lawyer based in New York; two years later, he succeeded Houston as the organization's chief counsel, although the two continued to work closely together. Marshall founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1940. (The Fund became a separate organization in 1957.)

      "Under Marshall, the NAACP's legal staff became the model for public interest law firms," wrote one of his biographers, Mark Tushnet. "Marshall was thus one of the first public interest lawyers. His commitment to racial justice led him and his staff to develop ways of thinking about constitutional litigation that have been enormously influential far beyond the areas of segregation and discrimination."

The Long Campaign

      Together, Marshall and Houston mapped a long-term strategy to challenge and eradicate segregation in the United States that focused chiefly but not exclusively on education. At the time, the NAACP was devoting much of its resources to equalizing spending and resources for black schools operating in a racially segregated system.

      Marshall convinced the NAACP to abandon that approach and said he would accept only cases that challenged segregation itself. The policy shift was controversial within the organization at the time, and several black lawyers who worked with the NAACP in the South resigned, increasing the burden on Marshall and his staff.

      For two decades, Marshall traveled constantly, up to 50,000 miles a year, supervising more than 400 cases at a time and often facing the threat of harassment and even physical attack. "I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a long time, but never quite made the grade," he commented.

      Marshall's record of success in striking down discriminatory and segregationist laws was extraordinary, winning 29 of 32 cases he argued. Among the most significant:

• Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938)
  argued before the court by Charles Houston, extended the Maryland Murray v. Pearson decision to the entire nation, maintaining that a state with a single law school could not discriminate on the basis of race.
• Chambers v. Florida (1940)
  reversed the conviction of four black men accused of murder on grounds that excessive police pressure and coercion rendered their confessions inadmissible.
• Smith v. Allwright (1944)
  prohibited "whites only" primary elections that selected candidates for the general election. Marshall considered this case one of his most important victories, according to biographer Juan Williams.
• Morgan v. Virginia (1946)
  barred segregation in interstate bus transportation. Marshall also prevailed on the court to desegregate bus terminals who served interstate passengers. The Morgan decision served as the legal basis for the celebrated "Freedom Rides" of the early 1960s.
• Patton v. Mississippi (1947)
  maintained that juries from which African Americans had been systematically excluded could not convict black defendants.
• Shelly v. Kraemer (1948)
  declared that racially restrictive covenants preventing the sale of property to African Americans or other minorities could not be enforced by the state and were therefore null and void.
• Sweatt v. Painter (1950) held that the University of Texas School of Law could not deny admittance to an African American student since the separate law school for blacks did not provide anything approaching "substantive equality."
• McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950)
  held that institutions of higher learning could not discriminate solely on the basis of race to meet the state's segregation requirements. The case involved an African American graduate student at the University of Oklahoma who was separated from the other students in the classroom and elsewhere on campus.