Within three generations the Marshall family went from slavery to the highest court in the land. Thurgood’s father, William Marshall, remembering the struggles in Congress and the courts on the status of slaves, instilled within his son a deep respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. A respect which the younger Marshall channelled into a degree from the historically black Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania and an application to Maryland Law School — which was denied because of his race. Yet Marshall would have the last laugh, as his numerous arguments in the courts on behalf of the NAACP and subsequent legal career taking him to the Supreme Court.

On this day, August 30, in 1967, in a culmination of an illustrious legal career, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.

The appointment took place just 12 years after the Rosa Parks incident and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and just two years after Martin Luther King led a widely-opposed march from Selma, Alabama. Which makes the unanimity of the Senate vote (69-11) and the recommendation of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who called Marshall’s appointment “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place” all the more remarkable.