It would not be an overstatement to say that no person has achieved more for race equality through legal processes than did Thurgood Marshall for the greater part of the last century. He pursued his passion for the rule of law and constitutionalism to dismantle, case by case, an entrenched and all pervasive system of segregation in the United States. And he secured not only for his own generation, but for the unborn millions in the generations to come, the greatest of all rights in a civilized democracy - the right to equal protection under the law. Thurgood Marshall, the great grandson of a slave who was brought to America in the mid-1800s, was born in West Baltimore, Maryland in 1908. His father served as a waiter at a local club while his mother was an elementary school teacher. After completing high school in 1925, Marshall attended Lincoln University from where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in humanities and subsequently enrolled in the Howard University Law School, graduating first in his class in 1933. In 1934, he joined the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and embarked on a career dedicated to protect civil rights and liberties.