Thurgood Marshall: The Brain Of The Civil Rights Movement

Thurgood Marshall got his start traveling the South in a beat-up 1929 Ford with a colleague, banging out legal papers in the car on a manual typewriter. Taking on Jim Crow, the South's entrenched regime of racial segregation, was dangerous work. When Marshall made the rounds of black schools in Mississippi, documenting their shacklike buildings and paltry textbooks, the state N.A.A.C.P. president arranged to have a hearse filled with armed men follow Marshall's car for protection.

Marshall went on to become one of the most important lawyers of the 20th century. He was the architect of one of America's most radical...

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