Famous Freemason - Bro. Thurgood Marshall

“The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.”

One of the greatest legal minds in American history Bro. Marshall was born on July 2nd, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Graduating from Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. in 1933, he established a private practice in Baltimore and beginning his decades long relationship with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In his first major case in 1936, successfully arguing before the Supreme Court that the University of Maryland Law School, violated the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. Showing that the state did not provide a separate but equal school for his client to attend and that therefore he must be admitted to the school.

Bro. Marshal was a founder of NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. As the head of the fund, he argued many seminal civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. Most notably Brown v. Board of Education where he successfully argued public education could not be separate but equal because it could never be equal.

In 1961, Marshall was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President John F. Kennedy. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to be the United States Solicitor General, up to this point, the highest position held by an African American in Government.

In 1967, Bro. Marshall was again appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson to the United States Supreme Court. Of the appointment President Johnson said it was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was the 96th person appointed to the position and the first African American. Bro. Marshall summed up his legal philosophy as saying, "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up." Bro. Marshall served with distinction until his retirement in 1991. Bro. Marshal passed away in 1993.

Bro. Marshall was a member of Coal Creek Lodge No. 88 under the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Oklahoma.